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Chapter Text

The Good Queen mourns, and the realms turn ever round and round.

Realms join to realms, stories to stories, and the Good Queen reigns over them all. Once, they called her the Evil Queen, and she hadn’t chosen or wanted to be queen. Now, she is beloved, revered, for decades– minutes– centuries–

(Time, you see, works very differently in each realm. In some, a lifetime passes in the blink of an eye. In others, the same time lasts a millennium.)

But the Good Queen mourns, and with her, her family. They mourn a woman once called savior , a lost girl who had been the Good Queen’s soulmate and truest love. She has been gone for a long time, now, and time stops nearly altogether in the Queen’s home in Storybrooke, their clock tower slowed by the weight of a family’s grief.

They call her Emma, and she isn’t gone forever. No one knows what that means, but a thousand mothers name their children Emma and hope that theirs might grow up to be the Good Queen’s savior, the woman to rule alongside her. A thousand mothers watch their children with hopeful eyes, wondering at every touch of a sword or every spark of magic, dreaming that their child might be Emma, reincarnated.

In the Infinite wet forests of a distant realm, one particular Emma– a woman with hair the color of a flaming sunset and a face that is wrong, that never quite suits her when she sees her reflection– thinks very rarely of a Good Queen or some deeper past and future. She thinks of little beyond the trees around her and the jaguars in the dark and the next meal she might steal. This Emma has no memories of a mother who had named her in the hopes of some great destiny.

(Well, she has few memories at all. There are vague impressions– yes, foster family to foster family, a period of being locked up that has made her wary of small spaces, pain and magic and faces she can never quite see– but she only knows the woman they have made her, not the woman she was. If she chases her memories too ardently, they fade away as dust in the wind.)

And this Emma– a forgotten Emma in a sea of Emmas, all dreaming of a soulmate– this Emma is the one our story is about.

The Good Queen knows nothing of this Emma. The Good Queen lives in her quiet home in a quiet realm between realms, a land called Storybrooke where she governs with the help of those around her. She grieves, and she searches for her Emma.

There are many reports, and each journey leaves her heartsick and longing. It’s never her Emma. Sometimes it is a cruel trick, a woman who knows something about Emma that has the Good Queen certain that she must be her , that only Emma could–

But it never is her Emma, not when they meet. The Good Queen– Regina , say her closest companions, those who don’t call her Mom – grows weary of searching, of finding the woman she loves. I will always find you is still not her fairytale, not the story she’s been written for. Redemption is an ever lurking jewel in the distance, gleaming as though to mock her and darting out of grasp.

And then comes a report, careful and uncertain, a message from a son full-grown about a princess of a faraway land called Bélar. I don’t know if it’s her , he writes, and Regina, the Good Queen, stares at the page until her eyes are cloudy with exhaustion and tears. There’s something different about her. Maybe it’s the reincarnation. But she remembers everything. Little things, not just the ones that all the others know. There is a space, and then one last sentence that changes everything. She saw me and she called me Henry , the message says, and Regina knows at once that she must go to Bélar.

The realms are sewed together like a patchwork quilt, chunks of each stitched to the next. There are magnificent palaces alongside mechanical wonders, lands that are dark and terrifying beside wonderlands of snowflakes and magic. There is some rhyme and reason to it, tiny transitions from one land to the next that the Good Queen and her sons had woven together.

Still, it is a long journey to Bélar, a land where she has never ventured before, and it weaves through a forest that never seems to end.

“An Infinite Forest,” says her younger son, peering out the window of their carriage at the rainy, green thickets. “We could be going around in circles without a map or a whole lot of magic.”

The Good Queen’s fingers twitch, but only a little puff of nothingness comes out. It fizzes out a moment later, and she sighs. “There is very little magic here. Maybe we should have teleported.”

(She could have, would have, but for the nagging doubt that had surrounded her older son’s letter. Something about it had slowed her movements, had made her reluctant to run to see this so-called Emma. Something about it still doesn’t sit right, and she prefers hope to the bitter defeat that inevitably follows.)

They stop in a clearing, ducking out of the carriage to explore their surroundings, and they glance at trees, looming around them. At a path that winds and twists in front of them so much that it may not be a path at all. At the low croon of cormorants and the sounds of a river rushing at their right.

They don’t see a green-clad figure as she creeps up to the horses that carry their carriage, freeing one carefully, until it’s too late.

Emma has found a duo of fools in her woods.

Anyone in her wet woods is a fool, of course. They are a deceptive, claustrophobic realm to those who don’t know the way, and Emma has survived on the food and jewels that visitors forget as they wander. But these fools have left their carriage, while dressed as stuffy royals, look around as though they can leave on foot, and they have left their horses unattended. There had been no driver, only a trio of horses, and Emma unties one carefully as the travelers peer around.

They’re strong horses, some of the most impressive she’s ever seen, and they’re going to make her a pretty penny in the markets. She unties the first and starts on the second, when the boy shouts, “Thief! Thief!”

Emma mounts the first horse in a swift move, and the boy draws a sword, barreling after her as though he’ll be able to stop her. She laughs, mocking and exhilarated. “Nice try, kid!” She knows these woods, and she could leave them lost and angry here for all the time it might take to sell this horse and eat a good meal.

She rides forward, and suddenly, the boy is in front of her. No , she realizes a moment later. No, she isn’t riding forward. The horse had turned, and she’s riding right back to the boy and the woman whose face is obscured by the carriage.

She turns the horse again, but to no avail. She’s riding back toward the carriage no matter which way she flees– magic , this is magic – and she flies off the horse, drawing her sword as the boy approaches with fury in his eyes.

He’s good , better than most fools who appear in these woods, and Emma spars with him, swings her sword and parries and feels something twinge in her memories at his gritted teeth. “You can’t escape,” he says smugly. “You think you can outrun my mom’s magic?”

Then it’s the woman who is enchanting the horse, keeping Emma from leaving. Emma deflects the boy’s blows, throws him back, and makes a wild beeline for the woman. She has no idea what she might do to stop her– what she can do when her opponent holds all of magic in her hands– but she charges forward anyway, sword in hand, at the woman whose face she can’t see–

She careens around the side of the carriage and comes face-to-face with a woman who raises her chin and looks at Emma with hard eyes; a woman who is more beautiful than anyone Emma’s seen in her life; a woman who staggers Emma in a way so deeply rooted within her that she can’t move. She gapes in silence at the woman, who watches her with disinterest, and then someone charges forward and kicks Emma in the shins, hard .

Emma topples to the ground. A little girl in a flouncy dress, not more than three or four, puts her hands on her hips and looks down at her, scowling. “Don’t mess with my family,” she says, planting a little sparkly shoe on Emma’s stomach.

“ Hope ,” the woman says, sounding more amused than anything. She reappears, towering over Emma, and looks down at Emma with displeasure. “Don’t antagonize the bandit.”

A third face appears beside theirs, the boy plucking little Hope off of Emma and hoisting her against his side. “What are we going to do with her?” he says. “Tie her up and leave her here at the mercy of the jaguars?”

“Wait,” Emma says, suddenly panicked. “Wait, no. Please.” She is full of fear, though she doesn’t know for what reason. Perhaps it is the jaguars. But she can feel something stretching between these people to her, something they seem unaware of, something that might be only in her head. She doesn’t want them to go. “Look, I’m one of the only people out there who knows how to get through this forest. I can guide you through it.”

They stare down at her, still wary. The woman says, “And we’d trust you?”

Emma shrugs, still on the ground. “I live here. I know this forest. There are people who have spent an eternity here, searching for a way out. If you want to join them, be my guest.” She does her best to sound unconcerned, though the idea of this woman and her children wasting away in the Infinite Forest churns at Emma’s stomach. “If you want out, take me with you.”

The woman watches her. She really is beautiful, something commanding and dark about her, but still soft beneath it. Emma gazes at her, a little awestruck, and the woman says suddenly, “What’s your name?”

Emma has had too many run-ins with the villages on the outskirts of the forest to give that out. Instead, she digs deep into memories she doesn’t quite remember, fishes through faint impressions and emerges with a name that has no other context she can grasp. “Lily,” she says.

The little girl tilts her head, reaches for Emma’s hand and flips it over to inspect her wrist. The woman says in a strangled voice, “Hope, she isn’t–” She stops, biting her lip, and the boy puts a hand on her arm and tugs her over to whisper with her.

They argue back and forth, too quietly for Emma to hear it. Hope sits next to Emma and says, “Uh-uh,” when Emma tries to sit up. Emma stretches back out on the ground, her back uncomfortably settled against a very gnarly tree root. “Have you ever seen a jaguar, Lily?” Hope asks curiously.

“Yeah,” Emma says, peering at the girl. She has her mother’s hair and eyes, but her face is different, somehow, and oddly familiar at once. Maybe it’s only that she faintly resembles the boy.

“I saw a sphinx once,” Hope remarks thoughtfully. “It asked me a riddle. Then it stole me. I get stolen a lot.” She laughs suddenly. “Henry says that it’s part of being a Swan-Mills.”

Swan-Mills. Something in that jolts Emma, too, sends a flash of impressions too detailed to examine whirling through her mind. But she knows that name even from her time in the woods, even from the years since the ones she’d forgotten. Swan-Mills is the name of…

The woman turns, and Emma knows at last who she is. Her throat clogs up with fear and something unidentifiable, and the Good Queen says, “Very well. You will join us.”

And so Emma, now called Lily, journeys with the Good Queen and two of her children. The true path through the Infinite Forest is long and twisting, too bumpy and narrow for a carriage, and they ride the three horses instead. “I can enchant your horse again, if necessary,” the Good Queen warns, and Emma rides meekly beside her.

(Perhaps she had expected the Good Queen to protest the loss of her carriage, of comfort in these tangled wet woods. Instead, the Good Queen– still in a dress too large, now stained by the underbrush– mounts her horse with the skill of a lifelong rider, her daughter tucked in right in front of her, a little smug as though she’d known what Emma had been thinking.)

The Good Queen dislikes having to follow someone else’s advice, Emma discovers quickly. The boy– Ry, they call him, and he draws his sword too easily and too grandly– rides obediently, but the Queen questions her every step.

“Why can’t we just follow the river until the end?” she demands when Emma leads them back into the underbrush. “Why are you making this deliberately more difficult than it has to be?”

Emma jerks a thumb at the river. “You want to follow it until the underbrush is so bad that your horse will throw you just from walking through it? Go ahead. I don’t care. I’m going to take a nap while you work that out.” She slides off her horse, leaning against a tree and closing her eyes.

There’s a sudden movement near her, and her eyes snap open. Ry is beside her, a sword through a large yellow-green snake where it had been slithering beside her. “That might have been a long nap,” he says, and the Good Queen laughs aloud, even more smug than before. Emma glares at her.

“I think we’ll follow your path,” the Good Queen says brightly. “Keep you out of trouble, thief.” She never calls Emma Lily , not like Hope does, the little girl testing out the word as though to figure out why it doesn’t sit right. “How many more days of this?”

Emma shrugs, climbing back onto her horse. “A week, if it doesn’t rain too much. Otherwise, longer.” The woods here are tangled and wet, falling water all around them from the leafy canopy above them. This is not a land that lends itself to horses or anything that traverses the underbrush, fighting through the land instead of letting it rule them.

“A week.” The Good Queen doesn’t sound as dismayed as Emma might have imagined her. “We’ll be very late.”

“Henry will wait,” Ry says. “He thinks…it sounded like he might have truly found her. He’ll want to stay with her.”

“Her?” Emma echoes, but they don’t answer. She knows, anyway. The stories of Emma Swan, the Good Queen’s true soulmate, have ranged far and wide for many years. Perhaps Emma is having a hand in making history, in finding the long-lost savior with them.

Somehow, she doubts it. For as long as she can remember, there have been stories of the Good Queen and the savior, of failure after failure after failure. Emma doesn’t understand why the Good Queen still searches. Then again, Emma can hardly comprehend what it might be to mean something to someone else, to be someone so important that the whole of the realms could spend years searching for you. She’s lived thirty-five years without ever mattering at all, after all.

Sometimes she has dreams where she matters very much, faint almost-memories of a lifetime before the woods. She dreams of a baby taken from her, of a knock at a door that had changed something pivotal, of ghostly images like mother and father that never fully form.

Her dreams change on the night after she meets the Good Queen. She sees the Queen, dressed in a soft grey dress, staring at her in disbelief. They are standing at the door of a house, and there is a small boy between them. She dreams of being dressed in white, fearful and sobbing, and of Ry with a sword out and his eyes blazing at the Good Queen. She dreams of a baby who cries and she can hold her, keep her tightly with her.

Her mind so often deceives her, pushes fantasies into dreams that can’t possibly be true, and she nudges them all aside.

In her dreams, the Good Queen is sometimes her friend, and she is soft-eyed and kind. Other times, she is imperious and cruel, snippy and reluctant to work beside her. Those dreams, Emma thinks, are the ones that make the most sense.

The Good Queen’s wit and heart are legendary, but in the wet woods, she is only a bad-tempered royal with little patience for Emma’s guidance. “I can just burn a route straight through this underbrush,” she says, cranky.

“You will not ,” Emma says in horror. “The land will swallow you whole if you do–” she slaps the Queen’s hand once, and the Queen looks at her in outrage until she ducks her head and clarifies, “Those big mosquitoes can poison you and leave you diseased.” She turns her hand over, notes with relief that no blood has leaked out of the squashed creature. She wipes it off on a big wet frond. “And I thought your magic wasn’t strong out here.”

“Fire doesn’t take much effort,” the Good Queen says darkly. “I’ve been in far more restrictive realms and found my fire.” Emma blinks, and the land around her becomes flat and bare, tinted with dim red tones. She blinks again, and everything is green again. “As long as I can channel any anger into fire, I can draw out flames,” the Good Queen says, eyeing Emma as though she might be a sufficient firestarter.

“Wow,” Emma says with a straight face. “Sounds very difficult for someone as relaxed and laid back as you.”

The Good Queen glowers. Hope giggles from in front of the Queen in her saddle. “You’re funny,” she says. “Mom’s always cranky. She misses Ma,” she confides in Emma.

The Good Queen says, “Hope, that isn’t really her business.” She is softer when she speaks to her children, less irritable, but that by no means lessens the glare she offers Emma.

Emma says, her voice hushed as though it’s a secret just for Hope, “Anyway, I don’t think it’s that. Some people are just born with bad attitudes. You know that in the legends, your mom is supposed to some weepy, beautiful, tragic figure?” She laughs.

Hope looks at her, wide-eyed. “There are legends?” she asks, eager at the idea.

Emma nods solemnly as the Good Queen stares irritably at them. “All exaggerated, of course. Everything the Good Queen’s done that might be legendary. But they miss out on all the important parts, I’m sure.” The Good Queen looks at her askance. Emma says, “Like how terribly she dresses for the woods. And how she has no sense of direction without using her magic. And how she thinks fire is the answer to everything.” She’s smirking, smug at the way the Good Queen’s face turns sour. There is something very invigorating about provoking the Queen.

“Do they talk about her cookies?” Hope wants to know. “Because those are really good.”

“Maybe that’s why they call her the Good Queen,” Emma says, contemplative. “The cookies. It’s clearly not her personality.”

“What do they call you?” the Good Queen says, her lip curling. “Idiot thief? Incompetent nobody? Pain in the…a– neck?”

Emma has been called far worse. “Mostly the first one,” she says matter-of-factly. “Usually while I’m running off with their pretty jewels as they wander lost through the wet woods. It’s never a good idea to believe you might be hardier than nature, queen of all the realms or not.”

The Good Queen scoffs. “I am a force of nature,” she says boldly, and Emma nearly believes her. “I’ve conquered entire realms. I’ve restructured the whole universe as we know it. And you think this sole rainforest would get the better of me?”

Emma spots an enormous spider on a tree beside them, splayed across a shadowy patch with a long web of draping silver beneath it. She lifts it easily, flinging it onto the Good Queen’s shoulder.

The Good Queen shouts, batting at it in horror, and nearly falls off her horse before Ry rides up beside her to straighten her out. He looks amused, and Hope plucks the spider off her mother’s shoulder to examine it. “What the hell, thief?” the Queen demands, outraged. Emma smiles serenely.

Hope says, staring in delight at the spider, “Can we keep it?” It’s as large as her face, and she pets it joyfully, as though it might be a puppy instead. “It’s so cute !”

Ry stares at them all in horror: at the Queen still breathing hard on her horse, eyes fixed on the monstrous creature in Hope’s hands; at Emma, biting back a smirk and also a tiny bit of nausea because spiders that size are really terrifying ; and at Hope, who is letting the spider crawl up the mane of their horse. “I’m adopted,” he informs Emma, his face screwed up in severe distaste.

Emma grins at him, at the Queen’s scowl, at Hope’s enthusiasm– then dismay, as an unexpected wind lifts the spider out of nowhere and throws it out of sight– and she says wryly, “Looks like you hit the jackpot.”

Ry is keeping watch for jaguars on their second night together. Emma awakens from a fever dream in which she’s on a bridge, shouting out to the Good Queen as the Queen methodically removes the slats from the bridge, and she wakes up in a cold sweat and can’t fall asleep again. She tosses and turns, glowering at the idyllic image of the Good Queen stretched out on a sleeping mat with Hope curled against her side, and Ry says, “I could use some company up here, if you want.”

She clambers over to him, leaning against a high rock out of sheer exhaustion. “I’m not taking over your watch,” she says primly, and he laughs.

“I didn’t expect you to. I’m still not sure you aren’t dragging us through the woods for your own amusement,” he says dryly. “And I don’t think any of us would be foolish enough to leave you alone out here. Except maybe Hope, who thinks you can show her a jaguar.”

Emma snorts. “Only if we’re very careless. The jaguars don’t go after people unless we’re really annoying. And I’m not going anywhere.” She isn’t certain why , exactly. Maybe her dreams have unnerved her more than expected. Maybe she’s just afraid of being alone with them again. “Your mother would probably enchant the ground so I couldn’t leave the campsite.”

Ry grins. “Probably. You don’t want to anger the ruler over all the realms. And she doesn’t trust you very much.” He considers. “I don’t trust you very much, either.”

“Thanks.” Something sparks within her, an unspoken pain at his comments that makes no sense at all. Emma leans against her rock, weary beyond words, and Ry looks apologetic.

“You did try to steal our horses,” he says. “Not that I think Mom would have complained much if you had.” He looks meditative.

Emma ventures, “You don’t seem to eager to get where you’re going. I thought you were trying to find…” It feels strange to speak of her, this mythical woman who shares her name along with half the realms, and she falls silent.

“Ma,” Ry agrees. “Yeah. Maybe it is her and we’re being idiots.” He stares into the dark, where monkeys chitter and crickets sing, the trees wrapped in vines and loud with noise. “She knew things that no one else could have. But I wonder…” He lowers his voice, glancing back at his mother as she sleeps peacefully. “I wonder why, if she knows who she is, she never came to us before.”

He sounds certain that she would have, and Emma is hit by another wave of longing– in the form of a boy with Ry’s face who sleeps in a hospital, sickly as though in death.

She kisses the boy and his eyes open.

The route tightens so much on the third day that they have to bid goodbye to the horses at last, careful as they cross the river at its narrowest part. Ry and Emma put together a raft, and the Good Queen waves her hand to attach the pieces of wood to each other.

Emma stares at the magical raft distrustfully. “You know, there are fish in this water that eat human flesh,” she says.

Ry makes a face. Hope says, leaning forward eagerly to peer into the river, “Can I see?”

“No,” the Queen says, snatching her up and pulling her close. “My magic might be muffled out here, thief, but I assure you that the raft will stay.” She glares at Emma, and Emma glares back. It feels familiar in a comforting sort of way, glaring at the Queen. For all the legends of some great and noble Queen, the Good Queen has turned out to be a bad-tempered ass, which is gratifying.

“I hope you’re willing to stake your life on that, Your Majesty,” Emma shoots back. “These waters aren’t calm. If your magic is weak–”

“My magic is not weak,” the Queen says, infuriated, and she sets Hope down and charges for the raft.

Emma says, “Hey, wait–” but the Queen is already pushing it into the water and climbing aboard it, sitting smugly on the raft as it bobs in the river. She sits with her back straight, still regal and untouchable, and Emma calls out to her, annoyed, “We don’t even know if the waters are safe!”

“I can handle it,” the Queen says, sneering at Emma. Ry lets out a very small sigh.

Hope says suddenly, “What’s that?”

That is a caiman, swiftly approaching the raft. It’s big. It’s very big, and Emma shouts out a warning that the Queen doesn’t hear. She’s already more than halfway across the river, and she’s smiling smugly as though she’s won when the caiman reaches the raft and tips it.

“Mom!” Ry shouts, and he looks as though he’s about to throw himself into the river, armor and all.

Emma feels a sudden surge of panic, protectiveness over them all, and she snaps, “Keep Hope safe,” and flings herself into the river instead.

She never, never goes into the river. There are ponds in the forest, small lakes that are clear and safe to bathe in and drink from. The river is not safe. The river is a fierce, magnificent being as dangerous as any jaguar, and such beings are meant to be respected and feared. Emma has learned that in her years in the forest, and she has never second-guessed it until now, a woman in danger across the water.

The caiman is twice the size of the Queen, and the Queen flails in the river, struggles to swim in her voluminous dress. Sparks of magic emerge from her hands, but they only glance off the caiman, causing it to jerk back but never retreat. “Your Majesty!” Emma shouts, spitting out a mouthful of water. She can feel terror creeping up within her, the longer she remains in these waters. She’ll be stripped down to the bone, crushed in the jaws of a fish or a caiman, swept away by the waves and drowned alone. “Your–” She spits out more water. “Majest– Regina!” she finally cries out, and the Queen turns, eyes wide with panic.

Regina , and the name takes her somewhere else. She’s shouting Regina! and there is blackness swirling before her, whirling around the Queen as though to take her. Emma charges forward, a dagger in hand–

She jerks back to the present, no time for fever dreams, and something is happening. A wave of magic washes over the river, the Queen’s magic more powerful than it’s ever been, and the caiman is silenced. The river is quiet, tamed, and the Queen is sobbing as Emma slides her arms around her and tugs her back to shore.

She’s warm in Emma’s arms, limp, and Emma holds her tightly as they ride a barely-there current back to Ry and Hope. “It’s okay,” she murmurs, though she doesn’t know if it is. “We did it.”

The Queen looks up at her, eyes red with pain, and she says, “Thank you,” in a strangled voice.

Chapter Text

They raft the river easily after that, and the third day turns gradually to night. The ground darkens before the sky where the canopy is thick, and Hope is drowsy as it grows dim. Emma hoists Hope into her arms, carrying her through the woods as they traipse on. “We need to get out of these clothes,” she says as the night grows cool and Ry sets up his sleeping mat. “We’ll freeze to our deaths if we stay in them much longer.”

She finds kindling for a small fire, and the Queen lights it without argument. The warmth is slight, heating up Emma’s fingers and her shivering body, and she sets Hope down a safe distance from the flames and peels off her vest and shirt and trousers.

The Queen is having less luck. “I can’t…” She gestures tiredly at her wet, dirty dress. “I don’t want to waste my magic on this. I have so little to begin with here,” she admits, a startling revelation of vulnerability from her.

“You used a lot to calm the river,” Emma allows grudgingly, and she almost misses the look of sheer despair that crosses the Queen’s face. “Right?”

The Queen doesn’t respond, and Emma moves to undress her carefully, unbuttoning a trail of tiny buttons and sliding the dress off the Queen’s shoulders. The Queen shivers, and Emma feels it under her fingers, strokes bare skin and feels the Queen’s breath hitch.

Emma removes the dress very slowly, her heart pounding with every motion, every brush of her skin against the Queen’s. The Queen stands stock-still, but Emma can see how she breathes rapidly, not unmoved by Emma’s actions.

“It wasn’t just my magic,” the Queen says finally, her back still to Emma. “I felt…” She lets out a ragged sob. “It felt like Emma.” Oh. Something had happened back there, something unexpected, and Emma wonders if they are indeed heading for their true Emma, if she’s helping them along the way.

The Queen, though, says, “Hope’s magic is just beginning to come in,” with such a sheen of grief to her voice. “It must have been her. She feels so much like her other mother.”

Emma doesn’t know what to say at this grief, at the naked love in the Queen’s voice. She stands in silence, uncertain, and finally ventures, “I hope you find her.”

The Queen turns, and her eyes are warm as they flicker over Emma’s body once before catching her eyes. Emma allows herself a moment to gape at the Queen, clad in only her underthings, before she’s trapped in the Queen’s gaze. “Thank you,” the Queen says. “You could have let me drown.”

Emma shrugs, uncomfortable with the recognition. “If I let you drown, then you’d never have a chance to admit that I was right,” she shoots back instead.

The Queen laughs, then scowls. “Well, you weren’t right,” she retorts. “The raft held perfectly.”

“The raft tipped over thirty seconds in!”

“But it stayed together, didn’t it?” the Queen challenges, superior.

Emma glowers at her. “That wouldn’t have mattered if you’d been eaten by a caiman, Your Majesty .”

The Queen shakes her head. “Ridiculous. This whole trip has been…ridiculous,” she says, almost to herself. “We should have just flown to Bélar.”

Emma rolls her eyes. “You think you could have coptered in through the rain in this realm?”

The Queen looks at her in surprise. “You know what a helicopter is?”

Emma has the sudden image of a flying vehicle, hovering with the help of rapidly turning blades. She’s never seen one, not that she can remember, except perhaps in her dreams. “I know lots of stuff,” she says, defensive. “I’m not just…a forest bandit.”

“Who are you, then?” It isn’t accusing, merely curious. The Queen seems only puzzled by her. “Where did you come from?”

It’s a question to which Emma has no real answer. But she desperately wants to have one, to continue this conversation that isn’t sniping or hostile. “I…I was born in a forest,” she says, and it feels right and wrong at once. “Not like this one. Drier. No jaguars, but wolves.” She strains to remember a childhood in the woods, but only recalls white walls and quiet suburban homes and loneliness. “And then I was somewhere else. It was a long time ago.” She licks dry lips. “How about you? You weren’t born the queen over all the realms, were you?”

“Only if you ask my mother,” the Queen says wryly, shifting to sit by the fire.

Emma sees within the flames– a woman, love is weakness, a hand in her chest– and sits down with a thud, far less gracefully than the Queen. “She must be proud of you,” Emma says, though it feels wrong on her tongue.

“She’s gone,” the Queen says simply, and Emma stumbles over apologies as the Queen watches her with solemn eyes. A pause, then, “She would be proud. It’s what she’d always dreamed of for me. It isn’t…it isn’t what I dreamed of for myself,” she murmurs, barely a whisper.

Emma watches her for a moment, her profile slight and perturbed and lit in orange fire, and she ventures, “What did you dream of for yourself?”

The Queen lets out a deep sigh. “What does anyone dream of?” she says. “A family. Love. Belonging. Redemption.” She stares at the flames. “Maybe this is redemption, making up for the Evil Queen I was. I just…I don’t know if I ever wanted to be a queen. What do you dream, thief?” she says abruptly.

Emma dreams of another lifetime, of a woman who wears the Queen’s face and a boy who had been her whole world, of parents as ephemeral as friends , of memories that fade to dust when she awakens. “I don’t dream,” she says.

She’s disappointed the Queen, somehow, and she knows it at once. She struggles to find something else to say, something less pathetic than invented fantasies about belonging. “I guess…I think I just don’t want to be alone,” she whispers.

The Queen looks at her with eyes gleaming with sadness, and Emma forces a smile, feeling lost and very small. “And you wouldn’t even lend me a horse to keep me company, Your Majesty,” she says, mock-hurt to wash over the actual hurt.

The Queen looks amused, then somber. “Regina,” she says. “I know you know my name. Use it.”

“Regina,” Emma echoes. Another flash– she’s screaming it hoarse, crouched down in the center of town as the Queen lies prone on the ground with a scroll in her hand– and it’s gone as quickly as it had come. “Does this mean you’ll start calling me Lily?”

The Queen purses her lips. “I don’t think so, thief,” she says, and Emma is oddly grateful for it. She would prefer, she thinks, to be called something she is than by a false name. There are thousands of Emmas in the realms by now, but it still is a name that’s hers, and so few things are.

There are only brief mentions of the other Emma, the one for whom they search, and they are glancing but common enough that that Emma seems almost to be with them all the time. Perhaps she is, for a family in a realm where a clock tower stands still and their mourning is eternal. Hope sits with Emma when they’re on a break in the afternoon, sitting on fallen logs and big rocks and eating from the berries and nuts that Emma deems safe.

“My Ma was a hero,” she says, and Emma winds flowers together for her, weaving a little crown of berries and flowers for her hair. “She broke lots of curses with Mom. And she loved us more than anything. I wish we knew why she disappeared.” She looks sad, wistful in the way of a child who can’t recall her mother. Emma remembers that same wistfulness, though she thinks it had turned to anger, eventually.

Hope has no reason to resent her own mother. “Did you know that my moms used to do magic together?” she says. “The magic of true love .” She says it importantly, as though it means everything.

Emma puts the flower crown onto her dark hair, smiling at her. “Sounds very cool,” she says.

“Have you ever met your soulmate?” Hope asks curiously. She has so many questions, and some hit a little too deeply, dig into raw wounds. Emma hurts at this one, a flash of memories-that-aren’t coming and going so quickly that she is only left with the brief impression of longing.

Regina is watching them, eyes narrowed as she listens from her log. Ry is eating and pretending not to be eavesdropping. Emma forces a laugh. “Living in the middle of an Infinite Forest isn’t exactly the best way to meet your soulmate,” she says, stretching out against the rock. A brightly-colored frog jumps onto her arm, then onward, in search of food. “Unless my soulmate is a delicious gold-scaled fish.”

Ry says, “You must have met some people out here, though. How long have you lived here?”

“As long as I can remember.” Emma shrugs, Regina’s sharp eyes on her. “I see people traveling through on their way to Bélar, yes. Sometimes I’ll even tell them which way to go. I don’t ever join travelers.”

“Except us,” Hope points out.

Emma tweaks her ear. “Well, only because you took me out, kid,” she says, grinning. “So if I’ve ever met my soulmate, I haven’t noticed.”

Regina says, “The whole concept of a soulmate is a fantasy,” which has all of them looking at her in surprise. She amends, “There is no magical connection between two people that determines that they are destined to become soulmates. I’ve learned that.” The smile plays at her lips, wistful and distant, as she says, “A true soulmate comes with hard work, with learning to choose each other first. Those connections are built.”

“Like you and Ma!” Hope says, her eyes bright, and Regina doesn’t respond, only leans over to kiss her hair tenderly. Emma watches them, her heart so very soft.

Her dreams are strange, disjointed, and always false. Her unconscious mind has latched onto the people around her and cast them as characters in its fantasies, fragments of a picture that doesn’t reflect who they are.

Her waking world is different, now, at least. Regina is loosened from the night they’d spent by the fire, speaking of distant times and secret thoughts. There is still sniping, casual and entertaining, but they smile more often, listen more carefully to the other’s needs. Emma finds herself watching Regina as she moves, an arm around Ry or Hope in her arms, and she feels like a stranger she doesn’t recognize, at times, awash with affection.

Regina catches her smiling, once or twice, and she looks at her with eyes that are warm, again, as much as the fire they’d huddled around that night. They aren’t getting along , but a peace has been achieved, and it leaves Emma feeling gentle as she never has been.

On the fifth day, they reach one of the small villages that are buried deep in the woods. “We’ll be able to buy horses here for the rest of the way,” Emma assures them. “And there’s an inn. We can sleep indoors tonight.”

“Indoors,” Ry almost moans in ecstasy. “A bed –”

“Pillows!” Hope says delightedly from where she’s perched on his shoulders, legs hanging down on either side of his neck.

“Privacy,” Regina murmurs dreamily.

Emma laughs at all three of them. “You’re so pampered ,” she says. “I sleep in caves and hope I’ll wake up in the morning. I haven’t slept in a bed in months.”

Regina stares at her in disbelief. “How have you survived ?”

“Luck, mostly.” In her dreams, sometimes, she thinks she creates a little force field around herself, keeping out snakes and other predators. But when she wakes up, it’s gone, only a figment of her imagination. “Also my badass wilderness skills,” she informs them, and Ry snorts. “Just call me Tarzan.”

Regina looks hard at her. “What?” she says. “Are…is he real ?”

Emma blinks. “I don’t…think so?” she says, shrugging. Already, she has no idea who Tarzan is or why she’d brought him up. Something about the woods, maybe. “Look,” she says, pointing. “The inn.”

The inn is a small building made of mud and clay and grass, and Regina looks skeptically at it. Her mood brightens once they’re inside, surrounded by strangers and food. “I’ve been fine with nuts and berries, of course,” she says haughtily, but she looks hungrily at the food they’re served, picking at it with intense restraint.

Emma snorts. “Regina, eat your fish,” she says. Regina gives her a dark look. Emma says, “So Hope will eat hers,” nudging Hope under the table.

Hope says helpfully, “Oh, no, I’m gonna eat mine if I get dessert after.”

Emma scowls at her. Hope, mouth full of fish, grins back. “Well, Ry won’t–” She blinks. Ry looks sheepishly at her over an already-empty plate. “Regina, would you just eat ?”

“Maybe she wants dessert, too,” Hope offers, peering up at her mother. Regina softens, taking a bite of her fish, then another. Hope preens. “See?”

Dessert is a flat plantain cake with coconut on it that Hope devours and Regina picks at again. “You should eat more,” Emma murmurs as Ry and Hope go exploring the inn. They’re still at the table, Regina’s half-eaten fish on her plate beside the cake. “You have a whole universe to rule.”

Regina rolls her eyes. “I don’t think the realms care very much if I give myself indigestion or not,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Come on,” Emma wheedles. “We’re going to need all our energy for the last few days of the trip.” It’s been raining off and on for days, slowing them down and making them miserable, and Emma isn’t going to add hungry to that list. “We need you at the top of your game.”

Regina sighs deeply. “Fine,” she says, and stabs her fish and takes another bite. “I hope Bélar has something more than fish in their palace. This is terrible.”

But she eats swiftly, as though she doesn’t mind it at all. Emma says, “I’ve been to Bélar a few times. Not the palace, I mean. Mostly just to the markets for bartering.”

“Bartering things you’ve stolen,” Regina says, and Emma shrugs, shameless. “So? Is it all fish?”

“Not even close. Meats and poultry and fruit , so much of it, melons and apples and grapefruit– and there are these pastries with nut that I bet Hope’s going to love– well, if they’re in the palace, I guess,” Emma says, remembering that they probably won’t be in the markets at all. “You’ll all be busy with your true love and stuff.”

“If it’s her,” Regina says, pushing moodily at a piece of fish with her fork. “I don’t know.”

Emma feels a twinge. “I’m sure you’ll know when you see her,” she says. “That’s how soulmates work, right?”

Regina just shrugs. “I don’t…I can’t help feeling like this journey is a mistake,” she says, eyes on her plate. “Like Emma would have come to us. Maybe I’m wrong. She’s always been a runner. Maybe she just…she realized something and panicked.”

“Realized what?” But Regina doesn’t answer her. Emma tries a different tack. “What’s your Emma like?” she asks. “The one in the legends.” She’s never heard runner before in the conversations about the savior in taverns. Emma, Regina’s soulmate, is beautiful and powerful and fierce, breaks curses and is a mighty force of good. She’d always seemed larger than life to Emma.

Regina sighs. “ Legends ,” she says. “Emma would hate that.” She smiles, eyes distant and full of love. “She’s…terrible. Crass at times, clumsy and prone to whining. Thinks with her fists first. Beautiful. So beautiful,” she whispers. “Noble to a fault. Far too married to the idea of pleasing everyone around her and never herself.” Now she only sounds sad. “I wish she’d realized that sooner.”

“She sounds…” Human , Emma wants to say, but she doesn’t know how Regina will take that. “Were you always in love with her?”

Regina’s eyes flicker to her sharply, then turn soft again. “Yes,” she says. “No. It was…a process, I suppose. From the moment I met her, I knew that she would change me. I didn’t quite know how.”

She falls silent, and Emma stares into the shadows of the inn, sees a moment– a boy running toward a big white house, Regina emerging from it with her eyes wide and pained, Emma only managing a hi in the face of her disbelief– and then blinks and it’s gone.

Hope and Ry are still exploring later, and Emma and Regina walk through the village behind them as they wander through the paths, exclaiming at all the ways that the forest around them is used to build homes. The village exists within the forest, the canopy still creeping overhead to cover the edges of it, and the people burn little fires in the night to keep jaguars out.

“My father used to tell me about forests like this one,” Regina says suddenly. “When I was very young, before we had left his kingdom, there were magical forests that were wet and ruled by no humans. People lived within them, but there were playful spirits there to appease, magic beyond even my mother’s comprehension.” She smiles, watching Hope as she catches a lizard, letting it creep up her arm. “I always dreamed of finding one.”

Emma grins at her, her heart full. “You tried setting this one on fire.” She can’t hide the fondness in her voice.

“It’s been a much better trip since I stopped fighting the forest,” Regina admits, and she leans against a tree with branches that twine with high branches from the woods around them, watching monkeys swing and chitter overhead. “I am too accustomed to fighting until I get my way.”

Emma snorts. “I’ve noticed.” They walk in companionable silence down the dirt path, keeping an eye out as Hope chases a kinkajou across the path. “It’s one of your best traits,” Emma says offhand, and Regina gives her a brilliant smile.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “There is something to be said for fortitude.” She looks at Emma warmly, as though she isn’t talking about herself at all, and Emma is breathless at her gaze, at the affection in her eyes. “Isn’t there?”

“There is,” Emma agrees, and then, uncomfortable suddenly with this intimacy, she says, “I guess that’s why you’ve never given up on your Emma, huh?”

Regina looks startled for a moment, then pensive. “I would never give up on her,” she says. “Just as she never gave up on me.”

Emma pushes, just a little more than she should, just a little more resentful of a mysterious legend than is reasonable. “Except when she left.”

“She didn’t leave ,” Regina says, and her voice is colder now, hurt. “Until she tells me straight out why she disappeared, I will search for her for an eternity. I owe her that much. I owe our children that much. And if she doesn’t want me, then…” She stares out into the night. “I suppose that will be what it will be. The clock in the tower will begin ticking once more. I will be alone.”

“You won’t be,” Emma blurts out, and it feels too forward, too presumptive. She gestures weakly at the children ahead of her. “You have…you have your family, right? And…and friends…” She doesn’t hope to believe that she is even a friend, and she says it vaguely, with a hastily-tacked-on, “I would assume.”

Regina looks at her, eyes very dark and sad, a beauty still beyond words. “I would assume,” she echoes, and she reaches out to touch Emma’s arm, keeps her fingers resting lightly there for a long time. Emma can’t breathe, her heart pounding at the barest touch, and she doesn’t look away until Regina, at last, leaves her hand to dangle at her side again.  

She wonders sometimes if her dreams might be real, if she’s remembering events that truly happened. There are too many gaps in her memories, too many empty spaces to fill with visions of a boy and a woman and parents and a home, too many empty spaces to fill with fantasies of being a hero.

That night in the inn is the first night when she wonders if she might be Regina’s Emma.

The inn has few rooms to begin with, and they’re all put into one large room. There are two beds and a couch that Ry volunteers to take, and Hope slips into Regina’s bed at the beginning of the night. Emma wakes up after a dream– a baby in her arms, a man beside her saying now we start over – and Hope is curled up in her bed instead, little arms flung around her midsection and face buried in her stomach.

She’d named the baby Hope , she thinks, as the dream dissipates, and she looks over at Regina and wonders, wishes it so hard that it brings tears to her eyes. But no , she thinks reasonably, she isn’t Regina’s Emma, convenient as that might be. Her memories are projections at best, stories she must have overheard come to life.

Because, for all her dreams of Regina, not one of them features them anywhere close . They share meaningful looks, they sacrifice for each other, but there are men there, faceless, meaningless men whom they embrace and supposedly love. Emma sees the same man lingering in too many memories, always hovering, always quick to insert himself between her and Regina.

If she had been in Regina’s life, it hadn’t been as Emma, but as someone else entirely. Emma watches Regina as she sleeps, listens to the little grumbles that she makes and smiles at the way that she curls into a tiny ball on her side, and she feels an odd sort of loss at that realization, a deep-rooted longing that has her melancholy.

Perhaps it’s only because, for the first time in her memories in these woods, she doesn’t feel alone.

In the morning, Regina is sleepy-eyed and slow to move, stretching in bed and wrapping her arms around her pillow. Emma shakes her shoulder as Ry looks on in amusement. “She wasn’t like this in the woods.”

“She’s always like this in the mornings at home,” Ry says, grinning. “The only thing that wakes her up is the smell of coffee. Ma once made some just for herself and Mom came downstairs with her eyes still closed, stunned her with magic, and then stole her mug. Mom is one-track when it comes to mornings.”

“Regina, come on ,” Emma says, poking her. “Ry, do you want to see if they have coffee downstairs?”

Ry goes down while Hope, equally sleepy-eyed, climbs into Regina’s bed to snuggle up against her. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Regina, up .”

Regina mumbles something, barely audible. “Mm. Got to...Emma,” she says. “Tell…mother I quit.” She sighs happily, still mostly asleep, and Emma groans. “...coffee?”

“On its way,” Emma assures her.

Regina’s eyes nearly open, then fall closed again. “I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you,” she sighs, and Emma’s heart twists. Regina is speaking to an Emma who isn’t here, an Emma who is legendary and who is human, and not to the grubby thief guiding her through the woods.

Regina’s eyes open at last, and she squints up at Emma. “Thief,” she says finally, and Emma exhales in relief at her recognition. “Where are we?”

“An inn at the edge of the forest,” Emma says. “You slept well?” She reaches a hand out, and Regina takes it, yawning.

“Like a log,” she says with marked relief. “I never want to go back into jaguar territory again.” At Emma’s look, she says, “I know, I know. How many more days?”

“One or two. Maybe three at most.” And it’s something about the sleepy-eyed smile on Regina’s face, the soft curve to her face and the light in her eyes, that has Emma afraid. Of what, she can’t say, except that it frightens her to her core. “And then I’ll leave you to your Emma,” she says, and her mouth feels even more dry at that.

Regina watches her, too sleepy to sound more than vaguely perturbed. “I know you joined us to save your skin,” she says, “But you can’t possibly believe that we’re going to leave you behind when we reach our destination. You’ll be rewarded handsomely for your efforts.” She pauses, uncertain, and then says, “And I…I think Hope would be very pleased if you chose to join us back in Storybrooke. You would like it there.” She hesitates again, and then says dryly, sounding more awake, “No jaguars.”

Emma can feel an unpleasant sick feeling in her stomach at the thought of going back with them, along with a yearning that threatens to swallow her alive. “I like the jaguars,” she says. “They’re majestic.”

Regina frowns, mock-offended. “And I’m not?”

“I suppose I could be persuaded,” Emma acknowledges. The sick feeling is as acute as the yearning, and she’s torn in two, uncertain of what she wants. “You know, if Hope really wants me to go back with you.”

Hope, still drowsy in Regina’s bed, doesn’t move. Regina smiles, soft and brilliant, and says, “Good.”

And Emma is helpless but to smile back.

They set out again in the late afternoon with horses and new provisions for the way. Regina has procured new clothing for herself and for Hope, the big, regal dresses gone and replaced with sensible traveling gear. Regina has wound up her hair into a tight bun, wearing a tight vest and trousers, and Emma is speechless with awe for a good half hour of their journey. Hope had found a vest her size that is just the color of Emma’s, and she’s gleeful about it.

She also insists on riding on Emma’s horse. “See?” Regina says smugly. “I told you she’s attached to you.”

“She’s just tired of your showy riding,” Emma says, which makes Regina dig in her heels and do some more showy riding on the route through the woods. Emma watches her, grinning, as her horse trots to catch up. Ry follows suit, equally showy, keeping pace with his mother. “No substance!” she calls after them.

“We’re gonna see my Ma soon,” Hope informs Emma as they ride. “That’s what Henry says.”

“Yeah?” Emma says, and she thinks of a baby in her arms, a man beside her telling her that everything is going to change now. The baby had been a girl, she thinks, and the memory fades in a flash. “That’s…exciting,” she forces out. “You must be excited.”

Hope shrugs. “I don’t even remember her,” she says. “Just stories. She’s cool. As cool as you.” She scrunches up her face, trying to remember. “One time, she pushed Ursula off a cliff because Henry was in trouble,” she says proudly.

“Cruella,” Emma corrects her absently. “It was Cruella.”

“Right,” Hope says, frowning. “Ursula got her song back. There are a lot of stories.” She contemplates the road ahead of them. “Do you think you’ll be friends with her?”

Emma smiles, and it feels uncomfortable stretched across her face, false and painful. “I’m sure we will,” she lies, because there’s no way in a thousand hells that she could ever be, not with the other Emma, not when…

She takes a breath. Whatever it is that’s making her heart clench like this, she has to fight it. It isn’t fair , not to Regina, not even to this other Emma who is everything that Regina’s dreamed of. She owes Regina that much for her kindness, for her offers to bring Emma somewhere where she won’t be alone.

Regina is in love with this other Emma, and Emma is fortunate to be considered, perhaps, a friend. To get along with her son and daughter. To have a place, no matter how peripheral, in her life. No fantasies of being Regina’s true love can change that.

She struggles to sound interested, invested in this other Emma. “I hope this really is your Ma,” she offers, squeezing Hope’s arm. “She sounds pretty awesome. You’re lucky to have two moms who–”

There’s a shout from up ahead, where Regina and Ry are riding, and then a familiar spark of purple magic. “Regina?” Emma calls, speeding up. “Ry?”

Regina is shouting something, and it sounds a lot like “Run! Run! ” Emma rides faster, one hand holding the reins while the other holds Hope to her, and she rounds a bend and sees what has Regina and Ry so spooked.

Ry is off his horse. Ry’s horse is on the ground, and a jaguar stands over it, its tail twitching as it takes them in. Regina has her hand outstretched, magic sparking from her palm, and Emma pulls the reins and halts her horse. “No one move,” she says in a low voice.

“Jaguars hunt alone, don’t they?” Regina says, her voice careful and slow. The jaguar’s tail twitches.

Emma shakes her head, clutching Hope tighter. “Not these jaguars,” she says. The forest here is enchanted, is a realm in its own, and it’s a different sort of magic than Regina would know. Everything thrums with its own energy here, everything is more powerful than it should be, and humans are prey before predator. “Look at the trees.”

Regina looks up and freezes. There are jaguars in the trees, their own tails twitching, crouched on their haunches as they prepare to pounce. “I’ve never encountered a jaguar pack before,” Emma says, watching Ry worriedly. “They swim, they climb, they run. I have never heard of someone escaping them. Don’t move,” she says urgently. “If you move, they leap.”

Hope is watching with quiet wonder. Regina is straining visibly, struggling to call forth more magic, and Emma wants to weep. The three of them– the Good Queen, her knight son, her magical daughter– they have a future ahead of them, a life to live, an Emma to reunite with. “Listen,” she says in a low tone. “Hope, I want you to slide very slowly to the ground. No sudden moves. Then you’re going to run to your mother.”

Hope looks up at her, trusting. “What about you?” she says.

Emma grins at her as best as she can, brushes a kiss to her brow. “I’ve got this,” she says. “Go.”

Hope slides down obediently, moving slowly, and Emma turns abruptly and charges at the jaguar on the ground. The others drop at once, racing for her, and Regina shouts, “ No! ” from a distance, beneath the roaring around her, beneath too-strong paws and snapping jaws. Emma draws a dagger, slices feebly at the animals around her, and sparks of purple magic appear in flashes everywhere–

–and then someone else is in the circle of jaguars, back pressed to hers, and a paw slams into Emma’s head. She jerks, woozy, a memory returning– a massive beast hovering above the town, Regina’s hands outstretched beside her as magic pours from her hands– she lifts her hands now, attempting to pull out something impossible from deep within her–

Regina is shouting curses at the jaguars, and at least one sounds like I’ll show you majestic! and Emma laughs helplessly, dazed and ready for death. “Get out of here, you idiot,” she says to Regina, and Regina says, “Over my dead body,” and Emma says, “That’s what I’m saying –” and laughs helplessly again. A jaguar leaps–

And falls, howling. An arrow sticks out of its side, enough to slow it. There are more arrows a moment later, a hail of them falling upon the jaguars, and the big cats scatter and flee, hunters becoming the hunted. Emma teeters on her feet, searches with blurry eyes for Ry and Hope, finds them safe on the side with a man who sends another dozen flashes of memory through her mind. “Regina–” Emma says, and Regina’s arm is around her waist, supporting her so she won’t fall.

“Help her,” Regina says to the figures Emma can’t quite make out, and she sounds frantic. “She’s losing blood. I need to be out of here– I need to heal her–”

“Who?” Emma asks dazedly, and Regina holds onto her tightly, brushes hair from her face and turns back to the figures across the path.

“Please,” she begs them, and then she falls silent, her eyes wide and stricken.

Emma turns to see what’s upset her, and sees only a woman, stepping down from a carriage. Around her, the archers have put their bows away, and the man who had been standing with Ry and Hope is smiling a watery smile at Regina. “We’ll help her,” he promises, taking a step forward. “But Mom–”

The woman descends, steps forward, and Emma can just barely make out her features. She has blonde hair that ripples past her shoulders, a confidence and a strength as she moves, and she has eyes only for Regina. “Emma?” Regina whispers to the woman, her voice faint, and the woman takes a step forward.

Emma, utterly spent, collapses to the ground.

Chapter Text

Her dreams are brief and confused, skipping from moment to unknowable moment in the blink of an eye. Here , she is wielding a sword and staring down a dragon, terrified and determined. Here , she sits on a log in the woods as her mother listens in silence. Here , there is Regina with her hand on Ry’s shoulders, walking cautiously toward her as Ry takes her in. Here , a man stalks toward her, tearing her apart with words as she feels so helplessly vulnerable. Here , she stands with her hands wrapped around a gun and Regina’s words are the only sound she hears through the buzzing.

She awakens in a soft bed in an instant of turbulent confusion. There is someone perched beside her, and a set of memories within memories has her say confoundedly, “Henry?”

“He’s being a doofus,” a sour voice informs her. Hope. She sits next to Emma, halfway bundled under the blankets that are wrapped around Emma. “He only cares about her . Mom, too.”

“Her?” Emma echoes, blinking again. Her true memories return slowly, and she reaches for her side in a sudden panic, remembering a pain that had been so great that she’d lost consciousness. Jaguar bite , she thinks, but when she peers at her side, she sees smooth, tender new skin. “Where…?”

She leans back in her bed and looks around. She’s in a nondescript room, in a bed more comfortable than any she can remember. The walls are white and dull, and there is a single chair set up beside her bed. Ry’s feet are curled up beneath him where he sits in it, and he manages a smile for her. “We’re at the Bélar palace,” he says. “Henry– my brother– he brought the army to find us when we never arrived. They saved us from the jaguars.”

“Henry,” Emma repeats, a shiver passing through her at his name. “And– then–” Reality comes tumbling down onto her in sudden detail. “The woman? Was she your mother’s Emma?”

She expects enthusiasm or despair. They’d all been so focused on their mother’s soulmate in the woods, so sure that they might be finding her or they might be broken by it. Instead, now, Ry lets out a sigh and Hope looks defiant. “I don’t know,” Ry says. “Mom seems to think so. Henry, too.” The words sting, hurt as they have no right to. “She…she definitely does seem to love Mom a lot, which is…” He shrugs uncertainly. “Mom deserves that,” he says finally.

Emma feels it like a grief of her own, a longing that she can’t escape. “She must be thrilled to see the two of you,” she offers, and hurts and hurts and hurts.

And Ry’s shrug does nothing to alleviate it. “When Mom is around, she is,” he says, and he leaves the rest unspoken.

Hope has no such compunctions. “I wish you were my Ma,” she says mutinously, ignoring Ry when he lets out a warning sound. “She’s boring. She wants us to go away. I can see . She just wants to marry Mom and–”

“ Marry ?” Emma repeats, and her heart clenches and shatters to pieces. Ry watches her solemnly, as though he knows, and Emma presses her hands to the bed and trembles. “Regina is getting married?”

Ry shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, a little sullen. “No one tells us anything. Grandma and Gramps are arranging it. They’re so happy their daughter is back.” He sounds bitter now. “Ma spends all her time with Mom. I’ve barely even seen Mom since we got here.”

She doesn’t know why she asks, why she invites more agony, and but she says it anyway. “Has…has she been to my room at all?”  

Ry’s face is answer enough. Emma leans back against a mass of pillows and finds no comfort in them, blinking rapidly and forcing a smile. Hope snuggles in closer to her, and Emma slips one arm around her, stretching out the hand beneath Hope to take Ry’s hand. “Your moms are just preoccupied, I’m sure,” she tells them, feeling lost and uncertain. “They’re getting to know each other again and it sounds like a lot is going on. They both adore you. Especially Regina.”

Ry squeezes her hand and Hope watches her, solemn, and Emma blinks away a few stray tears and forces a smile.

She’s been living in a haze for so many years that it’s jarring to be removed from it, to yearn so deeply for something else. The vague memories that seep through her mind are like silent taunts, little fantasies that will never come to fruition. Even in her dreams, she never dares dream of being with Regina, of loving her the way that the other Emma had. Even her dreams know better than to imagine the things she’ll never have.

She still sleeps more than she’s awake, but she can feel herself grow stronger, day after day. During all her time in the woods, she’d had a remarkable capacity to heal when wounded, to wake up the morning after a tussle with a caiman or a snake or fire ants with the injury beginning to fade. Here, she’s recovering even faster, and she dares to pad from the room where she’s been kept for a small time, gazing off of balconies at the tangled wet woods in the distance.

Ry and Hope come often to visit, with news about wedding preparations and a mother they still haven’t accepted. Emma says the right words, the words she’s supposed to say, and she aches with heartbreak as she remains alone in her room.

She is still here because she’d guided the Good Queen here, servants tell her, but they seem as befuddled by her as she is by them. The rulers of Bélar have offered her their hospitality for the duration of the wedding out of gratitude for her service, and she is brought rich foods and pretty dresses that would be shredded in the woods.

She asks instead for comfortable trousers and gets them. They fit perfectly, as though they’d been made for her, and she wanders barefoot through the small wing of the castle where she’s staying. Hope comes with her, happy to skip alongside her as Emma tests her walking strength and vows silently, as soon as she’s well enough, to return to the woods.

She walks along the balcony that overlooks the gardens one day, Hope’s hand in hers, when she sees Regina walking in the gardens below. Emma freezes. Regina is back in a pastel dress, too pale for her and too cumbersome, and the woman beside her wears a sleek red dress that hugs her hips. Emma . The other Emma, who has hair like the sun when it’s high in the sky and little freckles on her nose, who smiles at Regina with her eyes full of love. She leans in for a kiss, and Regina shifts slightly, the kiss landing on her cheek.

The other Emma’s face falls. Regina murmurs something, and they’re embracing a moment later. Emma turns away, unable to watch any more, and she says, “Hope, let’s go back to the room.” She lifts Hope up so her arms are draped around Emma’s shoulders, and Hope shrieks with joy all the way back to the room.

She still dreams of Regina, of long gazes pregnant with meaning, of brief smiles and a boy between them who looks like Ry but not quite. He is hers in her dreams, as much hers as Regina is not, and she kisses his forehead and he awakens–

She sits up in a cold sweat, and she senses at once that there’s a presence in the chair beside her. “Henry,” she says, still woozy.

“I see my siblings have told you who I am,” the man says, and Emma scrambles in place, sits up with her eyes wild and her heart pounding as it never has before. Her brain screams out in protracted agony, her heart yearning and desperate, and Emma doesn’t understand any of it but sinks back against her pillows, overcome. “Henry Mills,” the man says, sticking out a hand. His eyes are unfriendly. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.”

She remembers, in a sudden flash, lying in a bed in a stark white room, sobbing as a baby is taken from her before she can hold him in her arms. She takes Henry Mills’s hand and shakes it, the memory fading away. “Oh?” she manages.

“Lily, right?” Henry says, his eyebrows raised. “But that isn’t your real name, I’m sure. You’re the thief who escorted my mom back to my other mom. Where are you from?”

“From?” Emma echoes.

Henry shrugs. “Ry thought you were a holdout from the Enchanted Forest. Hope says that you’re from Storybrooke. Mom…” He looks troubled for a moment. “Mom won’t talk about you at all.”

That stings, and Emma swallows, searching through memories that seem to flutter away like fireflies when she reaches for them. “I don’t know,” she confesses to this man, to whom her traitorous mind has decided that she must be honest. “I just remember the woods. I was somewhere else before, but my memories…they come and go.”

Henry is unimpressed. “How convenient,” he says, his eyes narrowed.

Emma is taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Ry and Hope…they’re still young,” Henry says, his gaze fixing on her with piercing eyes. “They’ve spent all their time in Mom’s little bubble with her. They aren’t looking at new strangers in her life and seeing all the ways that they might want to disrupt it. They aren’t seeing how easy it would be for a fraud to take advantage of Mom’s vulnerability, to worm her way into my mother’s life, right when my parents finally have a chance to be happy. They don’t even realize that you’re turning them against Ma.”

Emma shakes her head vigorously. “I’m not–” she says, outraged and a little horrified at the implication. “I’m not worming my way into anything. I didn’t plan any of this. I haven’t even spoken to your mother–”

“Liar,” Henry says, and there is only suspicion in his gaze, only accusation. “ Liar . I know my mom’s been coming here every night. I know you’re the reason why she still hasn’t agreed to this wedding, like she keeps looking at Ma like she might not be real .” Henry glowers, emboldened by his own sense of sheer betrayal. “I know you’re the reason why Mom is holding back.”

Emma shakes her head again, baffled. “Regina hasn’t been here once,” she says helplessly. “I haven’t– It’s only been Hope and Ry. She isn’t–” It hurts again, thinking of it, of Regina tossing her aside once she’s of no use to her anymore. She blinks away tears, hurts as she had when she’d taken the dagger and raised it high, when Henry and Regina had passed into a portal and left her behind–

What . The memories rise and fall from her again, and she is left blinking rapidly, fighting tears of loss as Henry Mills studies her face, his brow furrowing. “You don’t know,” he says slowly. “You haven’t seen her here?”

Emma looks up at him in unspoken agony. “I’ve been alone,” she whispers, and Henry stares at her as though he doesn’t know what to make of her, with just a touch of compassion in his eyes. “I haven’t– I don’t want to get in the way of Regina’s happiness. I swear. I just want to…to go back to the woods.”

Henry nods slowly, appeased, though he doesn’t look satisfied. “Maybe that would be for the best,” he says, though he sounds uncertain. “You’ve caused enough trouble here with your presence.”

It hurts as much as Regina’s distance does, which is absurd. She doesn’t even know him, but she feels his displeasure with her chip away at something deeply rooted within her. “I’m sorry,” she says hoarsely, and Henry watches her again, closes his eyes and turns away.

When he’s gone, she can only think about what he’d let slip. Regina hasn’t agreed to the wedding. Regina is visiting her every night while she sleeps. She touches her side where she’d been injured and wonders if it’s Regina who’s been making sure that it would heal. If Regina is sneaking into Emma’s room while her soulmate is off in another wing of the castle, while…

Enough , she tells herself. There is nothing illicit about it. She is, at very best, a friend Regina had made during her travels. Regina healing her out of gratitude means nothing that Emma wants it to mean. She isn’t the right Emma, isn’t the savior with whom Regina has all this history. Even in her dreams, she can’t fool herself into believing that.

But she closes her eyes that night and can’t sleep, lies silent in her room with her breathing even until there’s the slightest sound of movement in the room with her. “Hello, thief,” Regina breathes, and Emma feels a caress of her forehead, a gentle touch to cup her jaw.

Regina’s hand tugs down Emma’s blanket and up her sleep shirt to lay a hand on her wound, healing magic washing over it. Emma’s skin prickles at Regina’s touch, craves it so deeply that goosebumps rise to meet Regina’s palm, and she opens her eyes slowly. “Regina,” she whispers.

Regina looks ashamed, as though she’s done something she shouldn’t have. Emma reaches up to touch the furrow of her brow, smoothing it out, then snatching her hand away as she remembers herself. They watch each other solemnly, silently, the room utterly still aside from their quiet breathing.

Emma dares, as she shouldn’t, to ask, “Is it…is she your Emma?”

She doesn’t expect the same resignation from Regina as she’s gotten from Ry, a deep, uncertain sigh. “She’s…she knows everything,” Regina confesses. “Even the secrets no one else knows except for those closest to me. And she tells me she loves me.” Emma takes in a shuddering breath, and Regina looks down. “She’s supportive and she’s kind and she’s perfect for me in every way,” she admits, and it’s shaky, the words emerging in a rush.

“She sounds perfect,” Emma says, and she remembers Regina telling her about her soulmate in the woods, remembers how she hadn’t sounded perfect at all, but human.

“Yes,” Regina says mournfully. “I’ve spent so many years searching for her. I wonder…” She looks up again, her hand still warm against Emma’s side. “I wonder if I forgot what she was really like, in the meantime.”

Emma says, her voice choking up as she does, “Do you think that’s why you haven’t agreed to the wedding yet?”

“How…?” Regina begins, and then sighs, conceding the point. “Yes. I don’t know. I can’t help thinking that if she were truly Emma, then I wouldn’t be…” She catches Emma’s gaze, her own eyes burning, and Emma can’t speak. “I wouldn’t…”

She lifts her hand, the healing magic still churning beneath Emma’s skin, and she lets out a sob that resonates through every fiber of Emma’s body. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she presses a hand to Emma’s cheek, holds it there and looks at her with such anguish that Emma wants to weep. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and she fades away in a cloud of purple, leaving behind only the impression of her hand against Emma’s skin, lingering for hours after she’s gone.

Emma sleeps, dreams of Regina hovering behind her as she starts a fire with anger alone.

“No! No! ” comes the bellow from down the hall, and Emma sits up, recognizing the voice at once. Hope comes hurtling into her room a moment later, flying into her arms with magic sparking all around her. “I won’t!” she yells at the doorway, her eyes red and her face streaked with tears and snot. “You can’t make me!”

“Hope!” Emma says, gathering her into her arms. She finds a handkerchief in the night table beside her, wiping off the girl’s face as Hope sobs into her shoulder. “Hope, what’s wrong? What’s going on? Is someone–”

Henry arrives behind her, an adolescent girl at his heels. His daughter, Emma thinks without any reason but the longing in her throat. She must take after her mother. “Hope,” he says tiredly. “Don’t you want to be the flower girl?”

“I wish I could be the flower girl,” the girl says, sighing heavily. “It’s the coolest job.” She grins at Henry, just for a moment, and then turns back to Hope expectantly.

Hope shakes her head vigorously. “I won’t! ” she says into Emma’s shoulder. “Mom isn’t marrying her ! I won’t–” She’s crying harder, the words coming out in gasps, and Henry heaves a sigh and steps forward, meeting Emma’s gaze.

“Mom has agreed to the wedding,” he says, his eyes boring into her as though seeking an explanation. Emma tears her gaze away, staring instead at the window across the room as Hope clings to her. “Hope is having some trouble coping.”

Hope glares at her brother. “I don’t want her!” she snaps, fingers digging into Emma’s skin. “She’s not my Ma! She’s–”

“You barely know Ma,” Henry says, and he sits in the chair beside Emma’s bed, leaning forward to rest a hand on Hope’s back. “Why don’t you talk to her? Try to get to know her? I bet you’ll love her as much as I do.”

Hope scoffs. “You’re an idiot,” she says, sounding like a miniature version of Regina, and Emma watches her with pained affection.

There are voices in the hall, and Henry says, “Lucy, can you go tell my grandparents where we are?” The other girl nods and vanishes into the hall, and Henry says patiently, “Hope, I know you’re…I know you’re scared that things will change. But Ma needs our help, too. She’s disoriented and she’s still trying to get to know you, and you aren’t giving her a chance. Don’t you think Mom would only love someone this hard if she knew they were ours?”

Hope refuses to answer. Henry catches Emma’s eyes, the slightest accusation still within them. Emma shakes her head in silent denial. She hasn’t done anything to turn Hope against the other Emma. She knows she hasn’t. But Henry still watches her, his eyes cold, and Emma says, “Hope, have you spent any time with…with Emma?”

Hope says between tears, “She doesn’t want to. I don’t want her to,” she says, defiant.

“I don’t believe that,” Henry says. “When you were born, she told me after that she wouldn’t leave you alone for weeks. She loves you so much.” He strokes her back and Emma sees– a baby, tiny and wrapped in pink blankets, always in her arms as she mourns a son she’d lost for good. “Don’t you want to know the woman who gave birth to you?”

Lucy returns to the room as Hope shakes her head and hangs onto Emma with all her limbs, wrapped around her like a particularly affectionate anaconda. With Lucy comes two more people, and Emma goes rigid as she sees them.

She knows them, but that knowledge fades the instant she feels a spark of recognition. “Snow, David,” Henry says to Emma. “My grandparents.” He looks exasperated. “Hope’s still…Hope,” he volunteers to them.

The woman– Snow– looks at Emma first, almost searching. “This is Regina’s guide from the woods?” Emma nods, afraid to speak, her heart beating so quickly that even Hope presses a curious hand to her chest. “I see,” Snow says. She doesn’t look at Emma with hostility, exactly, but there’s a wariness to it, enough that it pains Emma as well.

David is the one who addresses Hope. “Come on, kiddo,” he says, reaching out for her. “Let’s go taste test some of the pastries. I bet Emma will come join us.” Hope gives him a dark look, and he grins again until her expression falters. “You don’t have to be a flower girl,” he promises her. “You can walk down the aisle on my shoulders.”

Hope brightens, allowing herself to be disentangled from Emma and set on her great-grandfather’s shoulders. “Can Lily come?” she asks, challenging, and Emma winces.

“I think…I’ll pass on attending the wedding,” she says, to the silent approval of everyone else in the room. “You know how it is. The jaguars miss me.”

Hope twists around in sudden, frantic betrayal. “You’re leaving ?” she says disbelievingly.

Emma freezes, out of words to speak to the horrified child. “I…I don’t know,” she lies, the pressure of Henry and Snow and David’s eyes all on her. “I have a home in the woods, Hope.”

Hope’s face screws up. “You can’t go!” she says, and she bursts into tears, heartbroken. Emma can feel her own face crumpling, her stomach churning at the loss on Hope’s face. “You can’t! You can’t!” she gulps out, and David tugs her off his shoulders to hold her against his shoulder. “You were supposed to stay !”

“I’m sorry,” Emma says helplessly, and there’s nothing to say, nothing she can explain to the girl who must hate her now. “I’ll visit you,” she promises, and Hope only cries harder, thrashing against David, her face red and angry.

Henry bows his head. Emma can feel her throat closing up, and she manages only to say, “Mary Margaret,” and hold out the handkerchief that she’d used to wipe Hope’s tears away before. Snow takes it in silence, her eyes sad and hollow and guilty, and David and Snow carry Hope from the room together.

Lucy says, suddenly and worriedly, “Dad?” and Emma tears her eyes from the door and turns to Henry. He’s staring at her, whitefaced as though he’s seen a ghost, and she bites her lip and feels even more guilty.

“I thought this was what you wanted from me,” she says brokenly, but Henry doesn’t respond. He stares at her in fraught silence and then rises in an abrupt movement, making a beeline for the door, Lucy trailing behind him in confusion.

Emma flops back down in her bed, lost.

Regina returns that night, appearing in a cloud of purple smoke at the doorway before she says, “A date has been set for the wedding.”

“I figured,” Emma says dryly. Her shirt is still damp from Hope’s tears earlier. “Hope seems to be taking it well.”

Regina exhales. “I don’t know what to do about her,” she admits, sinking down into the chair beside Emma’s bed. “She won’t even talk to me anymore. She’s so angry , and I never thought…” She lets out a shuddering breath. “She’s been missing Emma so much over the years. She idolized her. And now, suddenly, Emma is the villain.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma murmurs, still guilty for reasons she can’t explain. “I…I hope she comes around on her.”

Regina seems to shrug it aside. “She said you’re leaving,” she says, and it’s strange, how much mother and daughter share the same features, the same accusing, betrayed expression at that revelation. “That you’re going back to the woods.”

Emma heaves her shoulders up, then down. “I don’t really see the point of hanging around here,” she says. “I’m better on my own.”

A flash of disbelief. “You told me you dreamed of not being alone.”

Emma remembers that night, remembers finding a sort of companionship in their whispered admissions, in the softness of Regina’s eyes. She swallows, feeling it raw in her throat. “I found something worse,” she admits in a whisper, and Regina looks stricken.

Her shoulders fall, her eyes wide with grief, and she says, “I never meant for this to…I don’t know how it could have…” She reaches for Emma’s hand and clutches it in hers, and Emma quakes with longing, with forlorn grief.

Emma says, heart thrumming, “When is the wedding?”

“In six days,” Regina murmurs, and Emma drops her hand. Regina looks sad, so very lost. “Snow thought there was no use in waiting. We’ve waited long enough. It’s only time for visitors to arrive.” She swallows, her eyes drifting shut for a moment, and then she says, “When will you leave?”

“Soon,” Emma mumbles, turning the hand that Regina had held to stare at her palm. She can no longer bear this palace.

But she doesn’t leave, even as the wedding preparations seem to consume the palace. There are people pouring in from all the realms in joyous celebration, and every room seems to be full of royals and strangers in odd clothing, smiling and speaking of Regina and her bride. Emma vacates her room to make space for visitors and sleeps out in the gardens, stretched across a bench and feeling peace in her discomfort.

She is going to leave, soon. She has healed from the jaguar bite except for four tiny scars where its fangs had been, and there is no reason to stay. She can’t bear to stay for the wedding.

The gardens are large and easy to get lost in, and Emma manages somehow to avoid Regina for almost three nights, lying in misery as she thinks of her. Hope hasn’t looked for her at all, as far as she knows.

On the second day, she had heard Ry and Henry speaking in the gardens, just beyond a tall stone wall. “She’s left,” Ry says, and his voice sounds hollow. “She told the servants that she didn’t need her room anymore and no one’s seen her since.”

“She wouldn’t just leave,” Henry says, and Emma is startled to hear that he sounds almost distressed. “She would have said goodbye to you and Hope, at least.” There’s a note to his voice that Emma doesn’t understand, an unhappiness that makes no sense.

But they move on soon after, Emma undetected, and Emma sits back against her bench and wraps her arms around her legs in quiet misery.

On the fourth day, with only two days remaining to the wedding, Emma is tipping her mouth to drink from a garden fountain when she hears voices approaching. She stands, wiping off her mouth, and stands to the side, behind a frond that obscures her as the speakers come into view.

What she sees sends another jolt of agony through her. It’s Regina, her hand in Hope’s, the other Emma walking beside them. The other Emma kneels beside the fountain, holding out her hand to let the water wash over it, and she says, “This display reminds me of Neverland,” smiling to herself. She turns to Hope, who watches her warily. “Did you know that we once went to Neverland to save your brother?” she asks.

Hope shrugs moodily, shifting closer to Regina. The other Emma says, “I fell in love with you then,” her eyes lifting to Regina’s. “Seeing how much you loved Henry– when we moved the moon to get to him–”

Emma watches her, struggling with all she can not to hate the other woman. Regina is smiling, her eyes soft and uncertain, and the other Emma says, “You were always so much more than the Evil Queen to me.”

Regina flushes warmly. Emma feels a hot bolt of jealousy running through her, and she sighs at herself, infuriated at her own frustration. It’s louder than she’d meant it to be, and Regina says, “Who’s there?” her voice ringing out through the garden.

Emma steps out sheepishly, avoiding her eyes as Regina lets out a soft gasp. “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t want to intrude–”

A tiny ball of energy slams into her. Hope cries out, “ Lily! ” and Emma lets out a startled little exhalation of joy, wrapping her into her arms. “I thought you’d left , Ry was so sad , Mom was–”

“Mom was?” the other Emma says mildly, and Hope stops, her eyes wide as she holds onto Emma. Regina puts a hand on the other Emma’s arm, and Emma’s eyes flicker to it, a new wave of pain at just the sight of it.

And she’d thought, once upon a time, that she’d be able to go back to Regina’s home. “I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye,” Emma promises Hope. “I just figured that some prissy royals would do better in my room than I would. This garden barely has snakes. It might as well be Disneyland.” She grins, and Regina eyes her oddly.

The other Emma says, “You must be Lily.” Her voice is curt, unfriendly. “I’ve heard a lot about you from my daughter. Nothing from my fiancée.”

“I’d imagine not,” Emma says tightly. Regina looks between them, her lips pursing. “Congrats on the wedding. Where were you all those years that Regina was searching for you?”

“ Thief ,” Regina says reproachfully. Emma shrugs, waiting for a response, and Regina says, “Though it is a question you haven’t answered for me before.”

The other Emma glowers at Emma, then turns to Regina, her eyes soft and loving and her voice syrupy sweet. “I don’t think that’s a conversation for others to hear,” she says, and she reaches out and strokes Regina’s cheek, her hand resting along Regina’s jaw in prominent ownership.

She smiles coolly at Emma, flaunting her position, and Regina murmurs, “Emma,” and pulls away, walking from the garden as her soulmate storms after her.

Hope stays with Emma, glaring after the other Emma, and she says, “I don’t like her.”

“Me neither,” Emma mutters, lifting Hope into her arms and then forcing a smile. “She loves your mom and I’m sure she loves you,” she amends. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

The happy couple are arguing, loud enough for Emma to hear. “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish,” Regina is saying, her voice low and annoyed, “But there’s no need to hurt her.”

The other Emma scoffs. “Please. She was supposed to leave . Instead she clings to you like some needy, simpering fool, and you allow it! We’re getting married! I won’t share you with a nobody you found in the woods!”

“Stop it,” Regina says, her voice hard. “Stop. You have no reason to be jealous. I’m marrying you . I love you. I spent years searching only for you . Do you see me running off with her? Do you see me giving up on us?”

She stalks back into the garden where Hope and Emma are, and she says gently, crouching down, “Hope, let’s go get lunch.” She gazes at Emma for a moment, opens her mouth as though to say something, and then shakes her head and walks on, looking back at Emma as Hope clambers from her to follow her mother.

The other Emma follows them, her expression smug as though she knows Emma had heard every word. She waits until Regina and Hope have disappeared down the path, lingering in front of Emma, and when they’re gone, she says in a low snarl, “Stay the hell away from my family .”

Emma’s eyes narrow. “I haven’t–”

“You’ve done plenty,” the other Emma says sharply. “You think you’re a match for our love? You think the years we’ve spent together can be erased by a few days with some pathetic little woman pining after my Regina? Go back to the woods where you belong.” There’s something wild in her eyes, something dark and trapped, and Emma can’t read her at all.

Emma wants to respond, but Regina is calling back, her voice floating through the garden, “Emma?”

The other Emma looks triumphant. “That’s me,” she says, and she turns on her heel and leaves Emma behind, angry and defiant.

She dreams for a moment of a man’s face sneering at her, a hook waving viciously and Emma clutching a baby tight as she reasons with him. Then his hook flashes out and she remembers nothing at all.

Regina knows where she is, now, but she doesn’t come to see her that night. Instead, it’s Ry and Henry who appear in the gardens, holding mechanical devices that cast light out through the dark brush. “Lily,” Ry says with relief when he sees her, rushing to her, and she catches him and holds him tight. “We thought you’d gone.”

“You can’t get rid of me yet,” Emma says, grinning. “This place is paradise in comparison with my woods. I’ll be out in a few days, but I plan to enjoy Bélar’s hospitality just a little while more.”

“Good,” Ry says vehemently. “I don’t want you to leave.” He isn’t Hope, who runs and embraces and grows attached so easily, but he watches her with a sort of wistfulness, and he slips a hand into hers and doesn’t let go.

Henry watches them, looking very conflicted, and he says, “You know that Mom would be happy to see you come back with us to Storybrooke. Have you ever been to Storybrooke?” He peers at her, inquisitive.

Emma shakes her head. “I don’t…” She pauses, a flicker of a memory building in her mind– a clock tower, a sheriff’s station, a yellow car that feels like home– and then it’s gone and she’s left confused. “I don’t know,” she says.

“You don’t know ?” Henry echoes. “How can you not know if you’ve been somewhere? Storybrooke. Little town in Maine, eternally stopped clock tower, prone to portals and mayhem, a sign at the entrance reading…”

Welcome to Storybrooke, and she’d crashed into it and awakened in a cell in the station.

“Henry, lay off of her,” Ry says crossly. “She doesn’t deserve a cross-examination. She’s done so much for our family already.”

“I don’t know,” Emma says helplessly again. “I’m sorry. I just don’t.”

Henry wavers, his face crumpling in frustration, and he bites his lip. There’s something very young about him in this moment, young as a boy half her height snatching an apple from her hand and throwing it aside, equally frustrated with her. “Fine,” he says. “Anyway. You should come with us back there.”

“Henry,” Ry says again. “She doesn’t want to.” He looks at her with too much understanding, too much concern, and Emma flushes. His hand is still warm in hers, and he murmurs, “I get it. I do. I just wish…” His voice trails off, and he leans against her, his head falling to her shoulder.

They sit in silence for a while, Henry crouched on a decorative rock opposite them and Ry dozing on Emma’s shoulder, and Henry says, “You called Snow something else when you gave her that handkerchief. Do you remember?”

Emma stares blankly at him. She remembers Snow, passing Hope off to David and calling to Snow to give her the handkerchief. She remembers Snow and David standing with her as a hooded figure swings a sword at her, standing with her in the mines as Regina tries desperately to contain the trigger, standing with her as she shoots fireworks into the sky. She remembers nothing at all. “No,” she says.

“No,” Henry echoes, and now he looks angry. “How can you not remember– what are you thinking about now?” he demands.

“I don’t know,” Emma confesses. “I don’t remember a lot of things. Sometimes I remember something but then it’s gone and I don’t know what it was. I see– things that aren’t real.”

Henry shakes his head. “How do you know that they aren’t real?” he demands.

“I know ,” Emma shoots back. She does, because they can’t possibly be anything but that. They’re imagined memories, hallucinations after too many years in the woods, and they don’t match the memories that Regina has of the real Emma. Emma is nothing more than a pale imitation. “Why do you care?”

“I just do !” Henry says, frustrated. “And I think it’s all my fault, but it doesn’t make sense and you aren’t helping–”

“Helping with what ?” Emma asks, bewildered. “What do you want from me?”

Henry presses his fingers to his temples, shuts his eyes and takes a breath. “Emma,” he says.

“ What ?” she demands. She’s beginning to get irritated with Henry, with his riddles and mysteries that he keeps from her. “What is it already?”

Henry stares at her, an odd kind of peace settling onto his face, and he walks forward to look her in the eye. She gazes at him, teeth gritted and at the end of her rope, and he leans down suddenly and presses his lips to her forehead. “Stay for the wedding,” he says, and he looks at her with deep-seated grief when she looks at him in confusion. “Please. Stay with us until I figure this out.”

She tries to sound aggrieved, but she finds that anger fades quickly when it’s directed at any of Regina’s children. “Well, it’s not like Ry will let me move anyway,” she mutters, gesturing to the boy sleeping on her shoulder, and Henry smiles like he’s in agony and walks away.

It’s only later that she realizes that Henry had used her real name.

Chapter Text

She wants answers and she fears them, but she wants them more than she fears them. There is an intrigue about, one that feels on the verge of momentous, and she lurks in the gardens and bounces Hope on her lap and talks to Ry and waits, waits, waits for something to make sense.

Henry doesn’t return the next day, the day before the wedding. As Ry tells it, he’s been inseparable from the other Emma all day, helping with wedding preparations and whispering in corners with his wife and Snow. Emma doesn’t know why that hurts when she hardly knows him, why her forehead still burns with a phantom kiss that had only lasted a moment.

Hope and Ry stay with her in the garden, hiding out from what sounds like some very enthusiastic planning. “You know, even when Ma was in my realm, she never cared so much about celebrations like this,” Ry complains, making a face. “This is too much.”

“I don’t want to be in the wedding,” Hope protests, stretching out on the ground. “I’m gonna hide here when it’s time.”

Ry snickers. “Everyone will know where you are,” he points out. “We have to go. For Mom.”

“For Mom,” Hope agrees reluctantly.

“And Ma,” Ry offers, but he sounds more muted about that, and he shrugs at Emma’s questioning look. “She’s okay. I just think…she’s changed. I don’t know.”

Hope says, “Mom should marry you ,” and Ry looks chagrined. “What? You said so, too,” Hope challenges him.

“It was a dumb thing to say.” Ry glances to Emma apologetically. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t…I didn’t mean to make it worse.” He leans against her, slipping his hand back into hers. Hope curls up against Emma on her other side, and Emma brushes a kiss against Ry’s temple, then Hope’s.

“There’s nothing to make worse,” Emma lies. “I don’t know what you think–”

Ry gives her a knowing look. “Okay,” he says. “But…I mean, if you wanted to–”

“Ry,” Emma says warningly. Going any further than this feels like a lost cause, like a foolish wish built upon dreams that had never been real. Regina’s love story with the savior is the stuff of legends , the sort of grand epic that only someone as mighty as the Good Queen and the savior might deserve. Emma isn’t so bold as to believe that she’ll ever have something like that with Regina.

Ry sighs. “Fine,” he says. “But it’s…” He swallows. “It’s the last night before the wedding,” he reminds her, and he waits until that sinks in. “Mom’s room is in the east wing, last door on the left on the second floor. Okay?”

Emma doesn’t respond, but Ry seems to relax, laying his head against her shoulder, too. Emma slips her arms around both children, holding them to her. Soon, they’ll be gone. Soon, Regina will be married to the love of her life. Soon, Emma will be alone again.

That night, she creeps up into the castle, slipping past guards into the east wing.

+

She doesn’t know what she expects when she knocks on Regina’s door. The other Emma, perhaps, glaring at her and sending her off. Regina alight with pre-wedding excitement, eyes bright and few thoughts of her thief on her mind. Henry there to tell her that staying for the wedding was a mistake, and that she should leave at once.

Instead, only Regina opens the door, eyes swollen and red with tears, and Emma lurches into the room. “What’s wrong?” she asks, and she wraps her arms around Regina clumsily, holding her close.

Regina trembles in her embrace, and she’s weeping again, clutching onto Emma with equally clumsy hands. “I’m sorry,” she says shakily. “I don’t mean to be– I never thought I’d get married again,” she says, and Emma hugs her tighter. “I can’t help but think that this is all a terrible mistake. I hardly know Emma anymore. And I– I–”

“It’s pre-wedding jitters,” Emma says, reassuring. “Everyone has them. When I…” She stops. She’s never been married. Has she? But weddings leave a sour taste in her mouth regardless, another mystery with no explanation. “Here,” she says instead. “Sit down. I’ll get you some…some wine or something to calm you.”

She sits Regina down on the couch, and Regina reaches for her. “Don’t go,” she says pleadingly. “I don’t need anything else. I can’t–” She touches Emma’s cheek, looks miserably at her. “I’m sorry I stopped coming to see you. I didn’t think Emma would take well to it.”

“Why not?” Emma asks, challenging. It’s absurd when thinks about it, when she dares to imagine herself as being anything more than a blip before their grand reunion and happy marriage. “What does she have to be jealous about? You have this grand love story, three children and a past together and…I’m just some woman from the woods,” she says, feeling it weigh down on her again.

Regina doesn’t speak for a long time, until her eyes are clearer, less swollen but still distant. She stares at the mirror across from them, reflecting Emma’s desperate eyes and Regina’s tortured ones, and she says, “You know, when I first saw you in the woods, there was something so familiar about you. I’ve never been able to understand what it is.”

“Yeah,” Emma whispers. Hadn’t it been the same for her? “I don’t know, either. But you were…special.” She dares to reach over, to stroke Regina’s loose hair where it falls to her sides, to tuck it behind Regina’s ear with a buzzing of you shouldn’t do that in her fingers. “Before I even knew who you were.”

Regina leans back against the couch, and Emma does, too, their gazes locked. “We have the worst timing,” Regina says with a wet laugh. “And I can’t help but think– I’m so ungrateful , to be with Emma at last and to have these feelings for someone else.” She’s crying again, tears slipping down her cheeks, and Emma can only shake her head, dumbfounded at that revelation. “The legends are lies,” Regina whispers. “I guess…exaggerations meant to make it all more romantic. There was no grand love story between Emma and me. Not yet. We hadn’t even gotten that story to begin with.”

“What…what do you mean?” Emma’s mouth is very dry, old dreams swelling up as though they’d been summoned. “You weren’t in love?” She’s been counting on the fact that they hadn’t been in her dreams to prove them false, to prove herself a fraud. She’d never recalled a kiss, a romance, anything that would have solidified her suspicion that she could be Emma.

But none of the legends had been real.

“I was in love,” Regina corrects her. “Hopelessly in love with the savior, who had married a pirate named Hook years before she’d disappeared.” Tears still fall from her cheeks, and Emma remembers the man who had been there when the baby girl had been born, the man who had said now we start over as though there had been a we . “Emma and I…before everything, we had had one night together on Henry’s graduation trip–”

Kisses, embraces, a heated tumble in a hotel room where they’d been entwined breathlessly. Emma remembers kisses for the first time, remembers Regina’s eyes wide and dilated as she’d moved with Emma. “Hope,” Emma whispers, and Regina nods tearfully.

“That was it. That was as far as it had gone. And then Henry left, and I left, and when I came back…something went wrong. Emma was gone soon after, and I’ve never known how,” Regina says hopelessly. “I’ve just been searching for so long, and now I don’t even know– maybe we missed our time, and we’re pushing for something we were never meant to have–”

But Emma can hardly hear her anymore. There’s a buzzing in her ears, a memory threatening to return, a man– Hook , Regina had said, furious– “Hook found out that Hope wasn’t his,” she mumbles, the thoughts coming fast and hard. “So angry. Cast a spell– to forget–?”

Regina touches her cheek and Emma springs up from her seat, spooked. “Thief,” Regina says, and she sounds frightened. “What do you know? What are you telling me?”

“I have to–” The memories are spinning in her head, and Emma is overwhelmed with nausea, with fear and thoughts that flee from her as soon as they’ve come. “It went wrong,” she says, despairing. “It was all real,” she says a moment later, wondering. “Then it was all real? Then I’m…?”

“Thief,” Regina says again, but Emma can barely hear her, dizzy with memories that fly past her like a whirling dervish, that burn as she loses them.

“I need–” She staggers forward, away from Regina, desperate for some air. Memories overwhelm her and she drowns in them, reaching for substance and finding nothing, and she stumbles for the door.

“Thief!” Regina calls after her, urgent, but Emma pitches forward, out of the room, and runs unsteadily down the hall to the closest open-air balcony.

She finds it around the bend, breathing hard, and only then does she take in the figure leaning against the railing. “You,” the other Emma– the fake Emma, if Emma’s memories aren’t deceiving her– says, and her skin seems to shimmer, something rippling below it.

“Who are you?” Emma says in agony. “Who am I?”

“I don’t think that matters anymore, does it, love?” says a voice from behind her. She turns– a flash of a hook, sparking as it lands on her head– and she’s on the ground, unconscious.

+

The morning light is beating down on her through the canopy, and for a moment, she’s back to who she was a few weeks ago, before she’d stolen a horse in the woods. And then, she remembers where she’d been, the fleeting memories that had spurred her into running, and her eyes fly open.

She’s lying on her back on the a deck of a small canoe, her arms bound together behind her. The man with the hook sits on a bench in the center of it, his hand holding one oar and his hook embedded in the other as he pulls them down the wet woods river, and Emma croaks, “Hook.”

“You remembered that, did you?” He sounds pleased, a little vicious. “I knew you’d come running the moment Regina found someone else. You’ve always been so predictable when it comes to Regina.” He sounds spiteful about it, and Emma shudders, squirming away from him.

He ignores her movements. “The spell was supposed to make you forget Regina and to hide you from her forever,” he says, rowing them down the river. “But you teleported away from me just as it took effect.” Emma recalls a moment of sheer terror, a change thrumming through her body, a desperate desire to flee as far from him as she could– then nothing. “It took me a very long time to work out how to avenge myself.”

Emma stares up at his back, at a coat and a figure she’s seen in dozens of memories that fade away. “We were married,” she says, a vague impression. “I was in love with Regina.”

Thunk . The hook is torn from the oar and lands dangerously close to Emma’s side. Emma squirms again, away from the man with the dangerous sneer and rage glinting in his eyes. “You never should have married me, then,” he grinds out, and Emma is wary of what he might do next, this unpredictable man who’d kidnapped her. “You could have pretended ,” he snarls. “I would have believed that Hope was mine. But no , you had to end things. I couldn’t stand by and allow myself to be so humiliated. You were mine !” The hook lands again on the surface of the canoe, shearing off a long lock of red hair.

Emma flinches, twisting away again, trapped against the side of the canoe. She wriggles her hands beneath her back, but the rope holds them tight. Hook glowers at her, oblivious to her attempts. “I had to punish you both for this,” he grinds out. “The nerve of Regina, laying any claim to you. And you –” He turns his unpleasant face on her again. “You’re not going anywhere ever again.”

Emma struggles with the rope again, strains hard and fails. “What are you planning for Regina?” she asks, fear thrumming in her chest. “Who is that other Emma? What will she do?”

Hook sneers. “The punishment will fit the crime,” he says, turning back to the water. “I found a siren to do my bidding and taught her all those little tidbits you shared with me over the years. You never stopped talking about Regina,” he grits out, but it sounds triumphant, too. “And now the siren knows you better than you know yourself right now. Regina will fall in love with her, marry her, and then the siren will break her heart.” He laughs bitterly. “Just as you broke mine.”

“You don’t have a heart,” Emma grits out, listening to the sounds of the river, and Hook slashes his hook down at her again, threatening. Her hands flash out for a moment, the rope fraying, and she tucks them back behind her back and breathes hard as she strains against the rope again.

“The siren will break her heart,” Hook sneers, leaning down so they’re face-to-face, Hook looming above her, “And then, when her defenses are down and she’s fully vulnerable, when she first wonders if Emma might be a fraud , the siren will stick a dagger in her throat and end her for good. No visits to the Underworld for her,” he hisses. “No savior waiting–”

Emma hears the sounds of the river, rising and falling, and kicks up hard with her knees, her hands flying free of the rope at last. She springboards her knees at Hook’s chin and he lets out a howl, slamming against the side of the canoe. She grabs a free oar and holds it like a sword, wielding it at him, and Hook slams it to the side and charges forward, pinning her against the other side of the canoe with his hook against her neck. “I can end you right now,” he hisses. “I will . Don’t think some deadened love of mine will be enough to save you. You were nothing but a distraction–”

“Yeah, I was,” Emma says, and she tilts her head back, throwing her back against the side of the canoe and tipping it just as an enormous caiman throws itself at the boat.

Hook snarls, “ Crocodile !” as he flies through the air, landing in the river. Emma flips, throws her knees over her head and lands on the back of the caiman, and it snaps at her threateningly. She slaps it with the oar, dazing it as she climbs onto the underneath of the capsized canoe, and she twists around to see where Hook has gone.

He’s lying in the water, face-first and thrashing wildly, and Emma sees the school of fish beneath the surface, a frenzy of red-bellied flesh-eaters attacking his exposed skin. Hook manages to lift his head for one moment, enough for Emma to see his face pockmarked and hollowed out by bites, and then he falls limp into the water, his feet no longer thrashing.

The caiman snaps its jaws at Emma and Emma leaps off the canoe to the shore, shaken, and tears away into the woods.

The sun is high in the sky. It’s almost midday, and a wedding is imminent.

+

Her clothes are torn as she races through the woods, damp and ruined by the sheer carelessness with which she bolts toward Bélar. She doesn’t care. A siren is marrying Regina, only to kill her when they go through with it, and she has to stop the wedding before it’s too late. She’s Emma , the Emma, if Hook is to be believed, and her first move as savior is going to be to save Regina.

The sun beats overhead, climbing higher and higher as the minutes fly by, and Emma begins to feel the jaguar bite aching beneath her skin again. She’s running with the energy of a much younger woman, of someone with the endurance to make it all the way to Bélar, but she’s only pushing off the inevitable. There’s no way that she’ll get there in time. Maybe after the wedding, once Regina is married to her true love and thinks that Emma is only there to ruin her.

For all she knows, Hook is the one who had planted all those memories in Emma to begin with, and she’s the wrong Emma.

No . She can’t think like that. If she thinks like that, the siren marries Regina and stabs her. She has to move quickly, and she can’t hesitate, can’t let her doubts win. But the sun is high enough that the wedding must have already begun, and it’s only a matter of time until the ceremony.

She runs faster, breathing hard and letting frustrated tears spill from her eyes. It’s been years in the woods, never wondering how she’d gotten there or why she’d been there. It’s been years with half her memories lobotomized, while there had been people out there who’d known her and loved her. And now– now, she can feel them slipping through her fingers with every step, with every moment that passes.

Her foot catches in a tangle of vines and she slips, topples to the ground and finds no energy to get up again. She strains and collapses even deeper, slipping into the forest, her head pounding and her lungs burning from the run. The sun has reached its height, and Emma lets out a single frustrated scream, raising her hands to the sky in despair.

There’s a roar in response, one that Emma believes is a jaguar at first, and she lets out another strangled cry. But the roar is accompanied by shouts, familiar cries, and Emma shouts, “I’m here! I’m here!” at the sky until an impossible, enormous dragon sails into view.

Perched on the back of it are Henry, Ry, and Hope, all three of them waving wildly down at her. The dragon swoops, Ry holding Hope tightly in his lap as she yells with glee, and then they’re all tumbling to the ground as the dragon transforms, very suddenly, into a woman with light brown skin and a smirk on her face.

“ This is Lily,” Henry says, triumphant, and he lifts Emma into his arms as the woman transforms again.

+

Emma curls up against him as they fly, Hope babbling a mile a minute. “Mom was so worried about you,” Hope says breathlessly. “The wedding started late because she wouldn’t go. Then Ma went to talk to her and she agreed to come,” she says sourly. “Ma didn’t even care –”

“Not your mother,” Emma manages, exhausted, and Henry murmurs, “I know. I know. Sleep. We have a while to go,” and he cradles her to her as she drifts in and out.

Hope sounds delighted by this twist. “She tricked Mom,” she says smugly. “But not me . I knew! I knew the whole time!”

Ry pokes her. “You were just mad she wasn’t Lily,” he says. “Or…not Lily,” He looks at her, hesitates, and Henry puts a finger to his lips. “Wow,” he says, eyeing Emma, and Emma shuts her eyes again.

When she opens them, they’re hovering over the enormous courtyard of the Bélar castle, which is packed to the brim with guests from all through the realms. A few turn as they soar overhead, and the figures at the dias shift where they’re standing, peering upward as their dragon soars to the ground. Regina is resplendent in white, standing beside the siren and watching them with a gleam of broken hope in her eyes. Emma sits up in time to tumble off in front of the dais, still ragged and filthy from her trek through the woods. Henry jumps off, Ry lifting Hope and setting her down at Lily’s claws as Lily rises back into the sky.

Regina is staring at them from the dais, her eyes wide and startled, relief in her gaze as it lands on Emma. “I see you dressed for the occasion,” she says dryly. “And nearly made my children miss my wedding.” But she looks uncertain, as though she’s waiting for Emma to speak, and Emma remembers Mom was so worried about you and speaks, emboldened.

“I was tied up on a canoe in the middle of the river,” she says sheepishly.

Regina tilts her head. The siren beside her says, “Regina, please, can we do this later?” Her hand slips into Regina’s, but Regina pulls it away, and Emma watches the siren’s expression darken.

From beside the siren, Snow says, “I think we should do this now,” and exchanges a glance with Henry. The siren’s eyes turn cool and dangerous, and she tucks her hands into the folds of her wedding dress. Emma glances over at her warily, remembering Hook’s warning of what the siren is capable of. There will be no hesitation from her. If Regina figures it out, the siren is dead, and the siren will kill her first rather than risk that.

Regina says, “Who put you in the canoe?”

Emma shrugs. “Some guy. He got eaten.” There’s a rustle through the crowd behind them in the courtyard, a quiet gasp. “I know…I get that you’re in the middle of something,” she says, biting her lip. “I just…I didn’t have a chance to say what I wanted to last night.”

Regina’s eyes shine, and she looks at the siren and then back at Emma, conflict apparent in her eyes. The siren says, “ Regina ,” and Regina hesitates.

Emma chooses her words carefully, struggles for memories that won’t come to give her the right thing to say. The siren is still lurking, a hand in her dress, and if Emma isn’t cautious, she’s going to attack now, with nothing to lose. Regina has only to show any sign that she doubts who the siren is, and anyone on the dais is doomed. “I know we only met in the woods. And you have all this history with…with Emma,” she says, waving vaguely at the siren. The siren relaxes, her suspicious eyes boring into Emma. “All these things she knows about that no one else does. All the time you’ve spent together. I’m no competition for that.”

“Thief,” Regina murmurs, and she looks close to rejection, to a gentle dismissal that burns at Emma. But there’s a plea in her gaze, a yearning for Emma to say all the right words, and Emma takes a breath as the siren moves to stand beside Regina, protective.

“I just…I think there’s something between us.” A memory returns, Regina staring at her in stricken silence in the dark of her vault, and Emma speaks words without considering them. “Something unique…maybe even special,” she whispers, and Regina’s eyes widen.

She whirls around as the siren’s hand moves, disarming the siren with a flash of magic and sending her tumbling onto the aisle across from them. The siren hurtles at them again, raising its voice and howling out a terrible scream, and Emma draws Henry’s sword and holds it tight in her hands, ready for the siren’s approach–

And Hope Swan-Mills, master at one move in every combat, sticks a foot out as the siren charges down the aisle and sends it flying.

Regina raises her hands and magic pours from them, slamming into the siren and projecting her into the air as she wails, their audience covering their ears as Regina’s magic pours into the siren, ridding it of the exterior Emma Swan that it wears and revealing the siren underneath. The siren wails again, and Regina’s eyes glint with fury, with murderous rage.

“Wait,” Emma says breathlessly, a hand on Regina’s arm. “Wait. This wasn’t her idea. He put her up to it. She’s– she’s just a woman who was forced into this–” Regina lets her hands fall, the siren writhing on the ground.

The king of Bélar says, “Guards?” Guards step forward to collect the siren as Regina watches with grim satisfaction, and Emma stares at her, struck for a moment at how beautiful she looks. She’s clad in a white dress that is simpler than the puffy, ostentatious ones she’s worn in Bélar until now, her makeup letting her eyes glow and her hair piled up so curls tumble down from its sides. Emma feels suddenly scruffy, holding onto her, as though she might mar her beauty.

She lets go of Regina’s arm, and Regina turns to look at her, her glowing eyes so bright that Emma can’t breathe. “I thought…I didn’t understand how I could love someone else when I loved Emma with all my heart and soul,” she says, stroking Emma’s filthy face without hesitation. “I have mourned for so long, grieved for so long, that I think a part of me never believed that it could be so perfect.”

“Regina,” Emma murmurs, her heart skipping a beat.

Ry says, disgusted, “Can you two please stop with the soulful gazing and just make out like adults?”

Snow lets out a disappointed noise. Henry snorts. “He’s a romantic.”

Regina leans in and Emma kisses her, long and ardent, until her whole body is on fire and the energy thrumming within her feels like it might explode. It bursts from her at her lips, from the kiss, in a multicolored wave of light that washes over her in a rush. Her hair flies out in every direction, red turning gold and her gaze just a tiny bit lower than it had been before, her face changing in a way that she can feel, not see.

She doesn’t see what happens, but she hears the gasps, her mother’s cry and Hope’s whoop. She sees Regina’s eyes bright with tears, David beaming, Henry and Ry grinning with that identical sideways smile. “Emma,” Regina murmurs, and Emma remembers a hundred times when Regina had said her name in exactly that cadence, the cadence that means I love you.

The memories linger, bright and colorful in her mind, tumbling back to her as though they’d only needed to be called to stay. A wish on a cupcake, a knock at her door, a son– a calling– a family– an enemy turned grudging ally turned best friend turned something more–

Henry’s graduation trip, falling helplessly into bed with Regina, too many feelings to resist for too long. Emma staying. Regina leaving. Emma pining, pining, desperately certain that her child had been Regina’s, desperate for Regina to return. And then Regina returning, and the night after she’d been crowned the Good Queen, telling Killian everything.

He’d planned to take her away forever, to take away every part of her that made her who she’d been and to remake her into someone else entirely, and she shudders and leans deeper into Regina’s embrace. “I love you,” she murmurs, her head sinking to Regina’s shoulder, and Regina clutches her, kisses her forehead and weeps tears of joy into her hair.

+

They don’t get married. They haven’t had good luck with weddings, and Snow makes some disappointed murmurs but doesn’t push them when Emma categorically refuses. Instead, they let Snow take the reins and turn Regina’s wedding into a massive Welcome Home! party for Emma.

“I feel like I might be a little underdressed,” Emma murmurs in Regina’s ear. She’s already sullied Regina’s dress in a dozen different places, leaving it filthy where it had once been pristine white.

Regina laughs. “I don’t care,” she says, but she waves a hand and they’re both in new dresses, Regina’s gold and Emma’s a deep blue. The grime is gone from Emma’s face, and Regina kisses her happily, swaying with her and pressing her lips to Emma’s cheeks over and over again. “I can’t believe you flew a dragon here to break up my wedding.”

Emma looks at her adoringly. “Is it really so hard to believe?”

Regina considers, pursing her lips. “It just…well, it happened in Shrek,” she says at last, and Emma stares at her in startled betrayal.

“It what ?”

“It was Donkey, actually.” Regina shrugs, nonplussed. “Hope and I just watched that movie a few weeks ago. I was wondering why they hadn’t made an appearance in any realm.”

Emma gapes at her. “I am not Donkey! Why can’t I– at least let me be Shrek ! I lived in the rainforest! That’s basically a–” She notices suddenly that Regina is laughing, her eyes sparkling as she twirls away from Emma and then back again. “Oh,” she says, mock-sourly. “I spend years as an amnesiac, isolated from my family and alone in the world, and you’re mocking me when I come home. I see how it is.”

“Emma, no,” Regina says, apologetic, and Emma feels a tiny bit guilty about pulling her leg. “I just…it was a rough time at the wedding, wondering where– and who– you were. Then I saw your face, and now I’m a believer–”

Emma shoves her away from her and then tugs her back, laughing, and plants kisses across her face. “Asshole,” she says. “I missed you.”

Regina’s eyes are tender. “I adore you more than words can ever describe,” she says, and that kind of makes up for the Shrek thing. She spins Emma this time, and Emma scoops up Hope from where she’s dancing with Ry and brings her into their circle.

Regina gives her a bear hug that has Hope screeching with joy. “Mom!” she says, breathless, as Regina smothers her with kisses. Regina twists Hope around so Emma can lift her by her waist, raising her into the air and grinning up at her little girl. “Ma,” Hope says, and she beams, beams, until Emma is blinking back tears as she tosses her and catches her again.

Regina holds her breath all through the tossing and the shrieking, and she swoops forward when Emma is done to seize Hope from her. “No more,” she says reprovingly. “Hope needs that brain.”

She puts Hope on her feet so Hope can dance with her, and Ry holds out a hand, grinning. “Ma,” he says, and Emma takes his hand and dances off with him. “I wondered sometimes, before you went away,” he admits when they’re alone, Regina spinning with Hope in her arms and then passing her off to Lucy and Neal, “I thought that we…that our connection wasn’t real. That I might have only loved you because you wished it.”

Emma aches. They had had only a brief time together before she’d been cursed away, and it had been...careful, every step and each interaction measured. She hadn’t known what exactly to do with this new son that Regina had brought into her life, another child for the two of them to share from a universe where she’d been someone else entirely. She’d been insecure around him, certain that she’d never be the Princess Emma he’d wanted, and he’d been just as insecure around her. “It’s okay,” she says, smiling at him shakily.

He nods, eyes bright. “It is,” he says. “I loved you without knowing you, without you being my mother. I wanted you to be my mother.” He spins her and she goes, then returns, and she stops all pretense at dancing and pulls him to her for a hug instead. “I might’ve chosen my moms,” he whispers in her ear, “But I will still absolutely call you out when you’re being embarrassing.”

Emma gives him a dark look. “I’m never embarrassing,” she says, outraged. “I’m the cool mom.” She’s always been the cool mom, no matter how many comic books Regina had read with Henry.

Ry shoots her a skeptical glance in response. “Uh-huh. Did I miss the ceremony when you became absolute ruler over all the realms?”

Emma blinks at him. “I don’t think you understand what cool means,” she says, very slowly. “I went to jail for grand larceny. I was a fugitive a few times. I’m all fuck the police here.” She reconsiders that one. “Well, technically, I guess your mom is–”

“No!” Ry says vehemently, pushing her away. “No, no, no !” Emma flashes him a smirk and turns, dancing with her parents in turn and then with Ella, and she lands eventually in Henry’s arms.

“Henry,” she says, pressing her hands to his and spinning. “I’m the cool mom, right?”

Henry gives her a dubious look. “When I was ten, maybe,” he concedes.

“Hope thinks I’m cool,” Emma informs him. “And you and Ry are both painfully uncool , so–”

Henry snorts. “Hey, Ma. You’re welcome for figuring out your true identity before you did so we could have these fun conversations together–” But he’s grinning, the sarcasm fading from his voice so there’s nothing left but gentle affection. “We have spent way too much time apart,” he says. “I’m half thinking about moving back to Storybrooke just so we can all be together again.”

“I think you should probably discuss that with your wife,” Emma says, attempting to keep the hope a little less obvious in her tone. Henry catches it anyway, giving her a knowing look, and he kisses her forehead.

“You know,” he says when he pulls away, “Not to wingman my mom or anything, but I see this lady on the dance floor who keeps eyeballing you like she might be into you.”

“Yeah?” Emma says, spinning casually with him.

“Mm,” Henry says. “Play your cards right and you might just find your soulmate today.” He grins, dancing them closer to where Regina is leaning against a column and watching them affectionately. “Lucy has been talking about showing Hope and Ry our new house in the Enchanted Forest,” he says when they’re right beside the column. “You don’t mind if they head back with me for a while, do you?”

Emma shrugs, eyes dancing. “I mean, who am I to stop Lucy when she wants something?”

She approaches Regina, her eyebrows wiggling, and she says, “Hey there, beautiful.” She curtsies, grinning at Regina, drunk on love and joy on a day that had begun so dismal. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Aren’t you forward,” Regina says playfully, her finger twirling around a lock of hair. She lowers her voice. “Think anyone will notice if we’re gone?”

Emma nods grimly. “Almost definitely.”

Regina heaves a sigh. “Good thing I don’t give a damn,” she says, and she tugs Emma to her, pressing her lips to Emma’s as they vanish together in a cloud of smoke.

They take the short way home this time. They reappear in Regina’s foyer, the room almost exactly as it had been before Emma had been gone, and Emma makes a break for the stairs, tugs Regina up them and kisses her with each step ascended until they’re clinging to each other as they stumble up the stairs, lips and hands everywhere as the kissing grows more and more intense.

They barely make it to the bed.

+

The long-dormant clock tower that rises above Storybrooke begins to tick once more.